The petrolhead Coalition’s latest gift to the petrolhead community

First this crackpot Coalition pulled the plug on speed cameras, then they mooted raising the speed limit on motorways to 80 mph, and now they have decided to spare petrolheads the effort of using the Freedom of Information Act in order to find out how much revenue local authorities accrue from car parking charges.

Councils will have to declare the total paid by drivers to park in both on-street and off-street bays, after new government figures showed local authorities’ total income from parking hitting £1.27 billion last year. 

Ministers believe the new “transparency” drive is vital to ensure local politicians can be properly held to account by motorists - and to help reverse the decline of the country’s high streets, including the closure of businesses. 

Earlier this year a government report conducted by Mary Portas, the retail expert, identified that high cost of parking as one of the reasons why shoppers were deserting high streets in favour of out-of-town centres where parking is often free. 

Mr Pickles said: “We are ending an era of bureaucratic accountability and replacing it with a more open era of democratic accountability. It is right that taxpayers get to see how town halls spend their hard earned taxes so they can properly hold local politicians to account. 

“As part of that we will expose a great council cash cow cover-up, unmasking punitive parking practices that hit residents in the pocket. We’re calling time on the billion pound local war against motorists – now, more than ever, we need to see the back of this shopping tax and encourage more people onto the high street.” 

Town halls are supposed to control parking to improve traffic flow and stop gridlock occurring, and they are prohibited by law from using their powers in this area simply to boost their income. However, ministers and their advisers believe a growing number of councils seek to get round these rules by earmarking the cash raised for other transport projects. 

Yes, it would be shocking to think that some of this money might end up being spent on cycling infrastructure, because as we know cyclists are layabouts and spongers and anarchists who contribute nothing to society. Nobody who rides a bicycle has any money, which is why so many businesses try to deter these ne’er-do-wells by refusing to supply them with bike stands. Keep these riff-raff away from our high streets. 

Brick Lane Blues

Back in February At War With The Motorist noticed that

Tower Hamlets council, with £300,000 from TfL, have announced that in the next few weeks they will be replacing the bricks of Brick Lane with a standard issue asphalt carriageway. 

Their rationale was

to “help to distinguish space for pedestrians from traffic”. That is, this is an explicitly anti-shared space move, intended, perhaps, to put pedestrians back in their place.

AWWTM commented

Brick Lane is a far more suitable candidate for shared space than most of the high-profile schemes. It is already a narrow single-lane one-way street with a high pedestrian to vehicle movement ratio — a high place status, in the jargon, and little importance as a transport route. 

Brick Lane is exactly the kind of narrow city street — important place for people but unsuitable for and unimportant as a transport route — where shared surfaces could be beneficial. 

So let’s see how this expensive “improvement” worked out.

 Oh, yes. Marvellous. Very Transport for London. Putting the car-sickness back into the heart of things.

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.

Repeat offender is allowed to go on driving

Whose heart would not soften in the face of anguish like this?

I can get a telephone call from a player saying they want to speak to me and I have to travel to Bristol. 

“Without a car it would be horrible. I just could not do it.”

STOP THE CHILD TERROR

This shocking photograph shows a law-abiding cyclist riding in the road while parallel to her can clearly be seen a helmeted cyclist on the footway approaching a blind corner.

This is a recipe for someone being almost killed or almost hurt. (Photo borrowed from here)

Remember that today’s child cyclist is tomorrow’s lycra lout.

The good news is that in some towns firm action is now being taken to nip child cycling terror in the bud.

Yes, this is Britain.

It may be that

Child deaths on Britain’s roads in 2011 were also up by 9% from 55 in 2010, to 60 in 2011. 

And that

numbers of cyclists on the roads seriously injured rose from 2,660 to 3,085 in 2011 – an increase of 16% 

but we want none of that funny foreign nonsense here.

I allude to Stop de Kindermoord.

Or to put it another way, in Britain:

WHERE DO THE CHILDREN RIDE?

And please remember A bicycle ceases to be a toy when it is used on the road. It is a vehicle 

and do, also, please, try to avoid cycling over drains and potholes. 

And now other news.

Britain's obesity epidemic has left schoolchildren requiring 42in trousers and 54in blazers. 

Retailers say they are even supplying primary school pupils with 40in jumpers – a size normally worn by grown men. 

The solution, obviously, is to buy a bigger car for the school run.

On the buses (not)

Lawyers representing clients on legal aid have spoken of their anger after being told they can claim less in expenses if they travel to court by car. 

The Legal Services Commission, which operates the legal aid scheme, is cutting the mileage rate for cars from 45p a mile to 25p and urging lawyers to use public transport. 

But many lawyers warn it is impractical and dangerous to catch buses while carrying confidential documents.

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.

The AA starts lobbying against the next fuel duty rise

Drivers facing 6p-a-litre surge in the price of petrol as AA warns price could soar to record levels 

The alarming prospect is revealed in a new AA Fuel report. It has sparked renewed calls for Chancellor George Osborne to abandon the 3p per litre tax rise he has already deferred from August 1 to January 1. 

And who can doubt that the crap Coalition will capitulate yet again to the fossil fuel lobby rather than risk being represented by the meeja as the vicious oppressor of the ordinary decent British motorist?

But as Cycalogical remarked a while back:

So why fuel duty? Why not cut VAT? Fuel duty only helps families who rely mainly on the car to get around. And it helps most those who drive high mileages in big, thirsty cars. In other words, it is regressive. And it conspicuously doesn't help those who have been hit by above-inflation increases in rail and bus fares. Or those who choose more active modes of travel.

A motoring marvel

100-year-old motorist Peggy Hovell shows no signs of slowing down.

The centenarian is still driving and has clocked up an impressive 85 years behind the wheel - despite never having taken a driving test.

And Jesus said: Thou shall worship thy fossil-fuel addiction

There are 47 churches in Westminster and its Churches Together campaign is calling on parishioners to stand in the 2014 local elections in protest over the parking charges.

Michael Beckett, church warden of St George's Hanover Square, said: "The churches feel Westminster isn't listening to local people and no one is in favour of these charges."

Small shops and chain stores have also joined forces to fight the scrapping of nearly all free parking in the West End.

Not mentioned on BBC news

The former chairman of the BBC Trust ran up expenses totalling more than £11,500 in six months, according to figures released today.

Sir Michael Lyons, who left the job on April 30 when he was replaced by former cabinet minister Lord Patten, spent £1,335.04 on cars despite having part-time access to a driver and car when working in London on BBC business.

Bedroom collides with car

A silver Vauxhall Astra is believed to have travelled down Manor Grove towards the junction with Meadstead Drive around 11.50am today, Saturday 23 July. It's thought the car went across the junction, through fencing, a garden and then through the front bedroom window of a bungalow.

A 13-year-old disabled boy was in the bedroom, sitting at a computer in his wheelchair. He became trapped underneath the car for at least an hour and had to be freed by firefighters.

The car driver, an 82-year-old local man, and his male passenger, also suffered minor injuries.

I suspect the significant factor in this crash is the driver’s age. In ‘drive until you drop’ Britain the system encourages the half-blind, stroke-stricken, heart-attack-battered geriatric to continue driving until such time as they crash, often with fatal consequences to others. And none of the three main political parties would have it any other way.

Conservative Party links to fossil fuel lobbyists exposed (or: how decision-making happens in Europe)

Chris Huhne has ordered a private inquiry into which fossil fuel lobbyists "got to" the Conservative MEPs who defied David Cameron and voted down an ambitious carbon emissions target in the European parliament on 5 July.

New research by the Guardian and Greenpeace into lobby groups and businesses seen by Tory MEPs in 2010 reveals there were more than four times as many meetings with fossil fuel companies, carmakers and others against stronger action on global warming than with green businesses and those pushing for deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

The research by the Guardian and Greenpeace shows that the 25 Tory MEPs met at least 300 representatives from fossil fuel businesses and their lobbyists in 2010 at more than 200 meetings, compared with about 70 representatives from green industries or lobby groups. The research also found the Tory MEPs attended at least 100 meetings with gas and oil companies and 75 meetings with car manufacturers last year.

Ford was one of the most hospitable companies, enjoying meetings with at least nine of the MEPs, most of them more than once.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders was also popular, alongside Jaguar Land Rover.

The UK's Association of Electricity Producers, which has strongly opposed any increase in carbon emissions cuts, was well-represented among the numerous fossil fuel energy lobbyists, along with oil industry groups such as the UK Petroleum Industry Association.

Limo dependency in local government - latest

Lord Hanningfield (alias Paul White), for ten years leader of Essex County Council, was a crook.

It was revealed earlier this week that internal audits in 2007 showed a lack of receipts for purchases on White’s corporate credit card. It also emerged he was spending about £5,200 a month on it and could sign off his own expenses.

With a record like that there’ll always be a place for him in the London Borough of Waltham Forest!

His Lordship was also fond of car travel.

His use of a chauffeur-driven car to ferry him from the council to the House of Lords focused attention on the authority's chauffeur service.

A Freedom of Information request by BBC Look East revealed the council paid £677,733 to run chauffeur-driven cars over the past five years. Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester Bob Russell said: "Frankly, I think it was an abuse. Essex did not need three chauffeur-driven cars. We know that because they've now cut it down to one."

Mike Mackrory, Liberal Democrat deputy opposition leader, said: "I find it quite extraordinary and one really wonders what on earth the journeys were and how that could be justified?"

The council now has one chauffeur-driven car, a Jaguar, used mainly by chairman Rodney Bass.

He told the BBC that if the prime minister could have a car, so should he, because of the number of functions he attends.

But it’s not just Conservatives who get up to this kind of thing:

The mayor of Tower Hamlets is spending about £1,500 a month on a chauffeur-driven car, it was revealed today.

Lutfur Rahman, who was thrown out of the Labour Party last year over alleged links with the Islamic Forum of Europe and alleged vote-rigging, was criticised today after it emerged he spends £72 of public money every day on leasing a Mercedes.

A spokesman for Labour-run Tower Hamlets said: "The sheer number of appointments he has to attend in any one day and the need to work while on the move means using public transport does not allow the mayor to perform his role in the most effective way."

Traffic jam on Pall Mall: just fancy that!

I noticed this on Friday’s London traffic news:

A4 London - Traffic congestion on A4 Pall Mall westbound in Westminster between the A4 Trafalgar Square junction and the St James's Street junction, because of new road layout.

Or to put it another way:

An ignorant cynic might suggest that relieving congestion by putting the streets back to how they were before they were reconfigured to relieve congestion... might not actually relieve congestion.

That’s because

The streets of the whole of Westminster, virtually without exception, are laid out with motor traffic the absolute and sole priority.

This latest futile exercise in attempting to evade the consequences of making car dependency more attractive than walking, cycling or using public transport has cost an amazing £14 million.

That cynic might further suggest that £14M would build a lot of cycle paths, which might encourage a few people to cycle rather than take a car or a taxi, and thus relieve congestion rather more effectively.

Henly’s Corner: Transport for London continues to lie

Garrett Emmerson, chief operating officer for TfL London Streets, said: “'The works at Henlys Corner will bring huge benefits to all road users along the A406 North Circular Road

All?

The reality is that no one who can avoid it is going to walk down this 8-lane turbohighway which requires pedestrians wishing to cross the road to do so in four separate stages.

So who is to blame for spending twice the entire budget of the Biking Boroughs entrenching infrastructure so deeply hostile to anyone not in a car?

In 2002, then mayor Ken Livingstone was pushing plans for this junction to be redesigned, with bus lanes and cycle lanes. However, Barnet’s then Cabinet member for the environment, Brian Coleman, led the council’s effort to block these plans under the premise that they were “inadequate to deal with the issue of endemic congestion.”

As we know, Ken was ousted by the Conservative contender in 2008 and true-blue Mr Coleman went on to become the mayor of Barnet in 2009. The bus and cycle lanes were subsequently removed from TfL’s plans, which were then agreed with Barnet, and as you can see the work is now underway.

Whether it’s at Blackfriars or Brixton, Fulham or Finchley, Marylebone or Mitcham, TfL’s current priority remains the same: make travelling in cars easier and quicker at the expense of all other transport.

It suits TfL and the outer London boroughs to pay lip-service to cycling and walking while continuing to build motorways in the middle of residential areas (while closing bus lanes, cycle lanes and footpaths).

Russell Square and Redbridge blues

A fairly typical opinion to be found on cycling discussion threads and in comments boxes:

Segregated cycling (especially in somewhere like London) is little more than 'pie in the sky,' there is little enough room as it is for cars and pedestrians, to divide that space up further will be far too costly and cause far too much disruption. Shout all you like but no government will ever go for it.

And while the argument that there isn’t room on British streets for safe, convenient cycling infrastructure continues to be asserted (no matter how often it is disproved), these streets are being carved up in ways which make cycling worse, not better.

This is what’s currently happening in Russell Square (north side). A new segregated cycle track? I’m afraid not.

The footway is being widened and cyclists are being forced closer to motor vehicles.

The works are part of the Bloomsbury Corridor project that also covers Woburn Place, Tavistock Square and Russell Square. It’s an area that has become dominated by motorized road traffic and the idea is to make it safer for pedestrians and cyclists, as well as drivers.

Just round the corner is Woburn Place. A street which is five lanes wide. One lane is dedicated to free parking for just a tiny handful of black cabs. Woburn Place turns into Southampton Row, where earlier this week a massive articulated lorry ran over a cyclist in circumstances which are currently unclear. The Bloomsbury Corridor project does nothing at all to keep cyclists apart from huge lorries or other motor vehicles, it does nothing to stop rat-running through Russell Square, and it does nothing to deter or reduce the huge volume of motor traffic using these streets.

Meanwhile in the London Borough of Redbridge

NEW proposals to bring about a ‘step change’ in cycle use in Redbridge are to be discussed at council meeting on July 18. Redbridge Council recently received a grant of £385,000 from Transport for London to promote cycling in the borough.

And as part of plans to put the money to use, councillors will consider proposals for new cycle routes on many of the borough’s roads.

The Council has set a target to increase the number of journeys made by bike in the Borough from the current 1 percent level to 1.5 percent by 2013, in line with the Mayor of London's strategic goal to get more people cycling throughout London.

This ‘step change’ for cycling is a self-evident fantasy, since the capital sum involved is derisory, some of it will probably be creamed off for promotion (‘encouraging’ and ‘celebrating’ cycling) and the rest will go on infrastructure. The question is: what sort of infrastructure? The answer is cycle lanes painted on roads. In other words, a strategy which accommodates cycling to the presence and convenience of motor vehicles, not the other way round. And while many cycling activists continue to insist that there just isn’t the space for Dutch infrastructure, in Redbridge they are managing to find it – for extra free car parking, on the Woburn Place model. This is Baron Gardens, Redbridge. A street where residents enjoy private off-street car parking and the council obligingly supplies even more, in the middle of a very wide street.

Next door in Waltham Forest they have an even better idea. Converting footways and cycle lanes for free car parking bays. Wood Street E17. A model which is being rolled out across the borough.

Things are getting WORSE, not better.

Blackfriars Bridge: it’s war

Boris Johnson and TfL are not going to budge an inch:

"My information is that the general speed [on Blackfriars Bridge] is nearer 12 miles an hour, therefore a speed limit of 20 mph isn't necessary and could be a serious impediment to smooth traffic flow," said the Mayor.

Ms Jones pressed the Mayor on why he was ignoring the findings of the report prepared by TfL in 2008. The Mayor replied: "I am told that it does not represent the best advice and therefore I am not pursuing it".

Let’s be clear that this is London cycling’s Tahrir Square moment. And its ramifications are much greater than simply cycling.

Blackfriars is about fighting the dirty, noisy, unpleasant and dangerous car-culture entrenched in our streets and in the minds of our city’s transport policy-makers.

If we win at Blackfriars, it can affect a lot more than just one bridge.

This is a test for London’s cycling community in all its manifestations, because whatever all the other differences are I doubt if there is a single cyclist in London who thinks that raising the speed limit here from 20 mph to 30 mph is a good idea.

I hope the CTC will get involved in this struggle and not just leave it up to the LCC. And also Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. And Living Streets and Climate Rush and all the other campaign groups.

In the meantime, don’t neglect the conventional channels.

The deadline for responses to Transport for London’s consultation Draft Network Operating Strategy is Friday. This is the document which sets out London Streets’ overall approach to the management and operation of the road network in London… as well as providing a framework through which to prioritise capital investment and ‘business as usual’ operational expenditure decision-making across the road network.

At the moment the strategy is all about cars, vans and HGVs, so it really is important that we get as many responses as possible from people interested in making London’s streets cleaner, more sustainable, more pleasant and less dangerous.

The M74, TfL and the London Borough of Waltham Forest

When Mark speaks of Their 1960s-style obsession with accommodating motorised traffic at all costs is to the detriment of all others. he is referring to Transport for London. But the same transport culture rules in Glasgow, where any short term ‘benefits’ supplied by the M74 ‘improvement’ will be cancelled in the future: "In the longer term, Glasgow can expect slower journeys, worsening air quality and more cost to the local economy." Glasgow’s modal share for cycling seems to be one per cent or less – no surprise there. But, hey, there’s a way to turn that around: Let everyone know why cycling is healthier, greener, smarter and fairer. Yes, that’s the UK cycling infrastructure avoidance industry frothing away in its traditional fashion.

Meanwhile in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, the car-mad council is about to re-engineer High Road Leyton and High Road Leytonstone to create more parking bays on the footway and create lots of exciting new bike lanes, every one of which will incorporate a special ‘dooring’ facility. Yes, with a modal share of zero point eight per cent there is still work to be done to discourage cycling – or for that matter walking to school.

(Below) The recent Olympic heritage ‘improvements’ to Cann Hall Road, Leyton, designed to increase vehicle speeds, deter cycling and maximise on-street car parking by seizing footway space for free car parking.

Transport for London: promoting asthma in children

The health of tens of thousands of children could be at risk after it emerged that more than 1,100 schools in London are within 150 yards of busy roads responsible for high levels of traffic pollution.
The schools, from nurseries to secondaries, are near roads carrying 10,000 or more vehicles a day - a level leading European scientists claim in a new study could be responsible for up to 30 per cent of all new cases of asthma in children.

The figures, uncovered by the Campaign for Clean Air in London, also revealed that there are 2,270 schools within 400 yards of such roads.

Campaigners today accused Mayor Boris Johnson of failing to protect the health of Londoners and said he "has to act immediately to reduce the total number of cars on our roads".

Kulveer Ranger, the Mayor's director for the environment, said: "The Mayor recognises that road pollution is a serious health issue for Londoners of all ages."

"He is doing all he can to tackle it across the whole of the city

Which is bullshit on an epic scale. Two examples of how TfL and the Mayor are promoting motor vehicle flow at the expense of pedestrians, cyclists, clean air, children's health, and a civilised London:

The Vauxhall Gyratory:

TfL's presentation reflects the Mayor's obsession with smoothing traffic flow rather than achieving modal shift towards more sustainable transport modes. Apparently removing the gyratory isn't a goer as it would require a 36% reduction in motor traffic in the morning forcing motorists to reconsider their mode of transport.

Unimaginable, doncha see. It's not desirable to reduce mindless motor vehicle use; we need to maintain the diesel particulate spewing, one person in a car, noisy central London experience.

The Tottenham Hale gyratory:

TfL justifies the incredible decision to remove an existing pedestrian crossing on the equivalent of an urban motorway.

The decision to remove this pedestrian crossing facility has not been taken easily. We considered how many people use the crossing as well as how many vehicles pass through the junction. We want to ensure that pedestrians have safe, convenient footways and crossing points. However, we also have to ensure traffic flow is maintained.

Which as far as cycling is concerned, amounts to what another cycling blogger has referred to as the historical lack of any coherent cycling policy for London, going back for at least the last 30 years.

(Below) It would be totally impossible to introduce a segregated cycle path on New Oxford Street because its three lanes are needed for empty taxis. Transport planning in London is all about balance, you see. And smooth traffic flow.