I remember when all this was bike stands

This is the side of the Bhs store, facing Walthamstow's Town Square. Just a few metres away there used to be five bike stands, installed by cowboy builders working for the Council. Because they lacked proper foundations they one by one came loose and then vanished. Naturally no-one at the Council was remotely concerned by these vanishing stands, least of all the three High Street councillors. They have never been replaced.

This wall used to be blank but now the space has been used to adverise car parking.



So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

Above photo of local cyclists taken from here

Waltham Forest council turns a blind eye to drivers obstructing Leyton Bike Shed

Last October I blogged about Leyton Bike Shed, comparing its provision with that found in the Netherlands. My post carried a photograph showing minicabs parked in the ‘no waiting at any time’ area, which includes the entrance to the shed.

When I went to the shed last week I was not unduly surprised to see the same two vehicles parked where they shouldn’t be (above). And the door, which is supposed to be closed, was wide open yet again.

And the automatic door is broken. The word ‘automatic’ has been crossed out and replaced by a handwritten sign which reads: UNLOCK + PUSH DOOR – PLEAS [sic] CLOSE AFTER.

And there you have it. A shoddy, substandard, poorly maintained facility, grossly inadequate in its provision, access to which is protected by parking restrictions which are daily flouted by the same vehicles. Very British-cycling, wouldn't you say?

It occurs to me that the Leyton Bike Shed may well turn out to be the closest mass cycle parking facility to the Olympic site. And who wouldn’t want to leave their Brompton here and trudge off to the Olympic ‘Village’?

And talking of the Olympics, CycaLogical has spotted an aspect of the orbital Jubilee Greenway which I’d missed:

The other miraculous thing about this world-class cycling route is you won't have noticed any roadworks going on during its construction. That's because they haven't built anything. In the words of Jim Walker, director of the Jubilee Walkway Trust, "We have worked out there is already a route you can follow - it's not something we have had to build." Awesome.

crap cycling at The Mall, Walthamstow

At The Mall Walthamstow shopping centre, we care about our shoppers. Your experience with us matters and that's why we constantly review and update our facilities, so you experience the best standards, every day of the year.

See if you can spot which travel mode is missing here.

Yes, The Mall has 850 parking spaces and seven bicycle stands, shown here. Today.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to this place opening. It will be easy to get to by car, has 5,000 parking bays, and some super shops. And obviously there will be no point in going there by bus (takes forever), by train or tube (a hugely complicated endeavour from Walthamstow) or by cycling (far too unpleasant, stressful and dangerous). And, hey, Westfield is passionate about the environment.

Inadequate cycle parking at Blackhorse Road station

Blackhorse Road station in Walthamstow serves both the Victoria Line tube and the overground Gospel Oak to Barking line. It has 6.179 million passengers per year.

The station is on the corner of a hideous junction which is a testament to the Transport for London culture of putting motor vehicle flow before the convenience and safety of cyclists and pedestrians. Pedestrians have to cross each arm of the junction in two signalled stages, being held at a cattle pen in the middle in the traditional way. The eastbound cycle lane has a dedicated cycle crossing signal, although The Grumpy Cyclist reports being cut-up by a left-hook driver who treated the cycle light as if it also applied to drivers, and in the past I’ve found the light not working. If you are cycling westbound this is the cycle lane at this junction:

Sixteen months ago I pointed out that Blackhorse Road station has parking for 12 bicycles and 350 cars.

I can now report that the old cycle stands have been ripped out and replaced by new ones. Yes, an extra seven have been included, making a grand total of nineteen in all.

And you know what? It isn’t enough. On weekdays you will often find every single stand with two bikes attached to it. Which means that latecomers have to use the railings outside the station. Even at the most rudimentary level of providing cycle parking, the London Borough of Waltham Forest is crap.

Waltham Forest council: discouraging cycling and encouraging car dependency among its employees

Come with this blog on a tour of the car parks of the borough. Today we are stopping off at Chestnuts House, home of the Council’s Community Learning and Skills Service. And one thing all members of the local community need to know is that if you work for the Council then free car parking is widely available. But please, no bicycles.

The Community Learning and Skills Service is based just a short distance from Walthamstow Central, which offers both Victoria Line tube trains as well as overground rail services running between Chingford, Hackney and Liverpool Street Station in the City of London. It is also on numerous bus routes. So no one who lives locally needs to drive here to work at all.

(Below) More free car parking at Chestnuts House.

Part of the site is devoted to an outfit called Connexions, which seems to dispense advice to teenagers. Free parking available for both staff and the younger driver.

And if you choose to come to work by bicycle? You are obviously some sort of freak. At Chestnuts House there are no bike stands at all. The Council has no policy on supplying cycle parking for staff who work for it – that’s because management all drive cars (it’s the grey fleet culture), and the same seems to apply to councillors. But if you go round the side of the building you could always lock your bike to the fire escape (below). It’s probably a breach of health and safety law but, hey, the Council has never worried too much about stuff like that. Except, of course, when it’s necessary to deny members of the public access to council meetings!

New cycle parking provision in Waltham Forest

Cycle parking provision continues to grow as the Greenest council in London allows more and more parking on pavements, which is accompanied by the installation of new sign posts bearing the message PARK IN MARKED BAYS ONLY. Cyclists are then free to lock their bikes to these poles. If car parking was not allowed on the pavement these signs would not be here and cyclists would then have nowhere to lock their bikes. So stop grumbling. Last week was Climate Awareness Week, and this week is National Rainforest Week. Next week will be something else I expect. Electric Car Week, perhaps. Bless.

Cycle parking in central London

(Above) car parking on Charing Cross Road . It’s a shame the road is too narrow for a segregated cycle path innit.

(Below) cycle parking on Charing Cross Road.





























(Below) This is where I like to park my bike when I’m visiting the British Museum (handy for the rear entrance). Woops! All the stands have gone.































(Below) And these are the temporary cycle parking arrangements.




























By the way the air pollution in London is nothing to do with it being a car-sick, car-sodden city. Nah, it’s all the fault of foreigners.

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

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

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

As those NHS staff members who do cycle have observed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The practice has 23 members of staff

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

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

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































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


























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

Leyton Library, cycling, & the great Waltham Forest ‘spatial planning’ fraud

If you want to understand everything that’s rotten in the planning and transport strategies of the London Borough of Waltham Forest, look no further than the re-vamped Leyton Library.

With charactereristic grey fleet cognitive dissonance, the car-centric planners gush about a truly sustainable community for all of us to enjoy to the full.

What the ‘spatial planners’ of Waltham Forest know about sustainability could be written on the back of a postage stamp and you’d still need an electron microscope to read it.

Naturally, being Waltham Forest, the great ‘spatial planning’ confidence trick requires consultants

Waltham Forest is a car-sick, anti-cycling borough with a cycling modal share which aptly reflects the car-centric priorities of everyone involved in urban planning in the borough. The planning officers of Waltham Forest understand nothing about cycling, but this doesn’t really matter because no matter how much cycling stagnates or declines no one wants to talk about failure and no one is accountable.

The exterior of the newly refurbished Leyton Library represents everything that’s wrong about planning in Waltham Forest.

The footway has been carved up for parking bays. For a local library! Why everyone at TfL pretends to be baffled by the spectacular levels of car dependency in Outer London never fails to surprise me. When the entire transport infrastructure is centred on catering for the needs of people who drive short distances, what do you expect?

The top priority outside Leyton Library is car parking. Moreover, the provision of these parking bays is detrimental to cycling on a major route (High Road Leyton, A112) because it sandwiches cyclists between parked vehicles and overtaking vehicles, with the threat of 'dooring' if you stay in the cycle lane, or verbal abuse and horn-blowing if you cycle outside the lane.































The nearest parking to the library is not bike parking but car parking.

And here’s the nearest bike parking, beyond the white car shown above. A solitary stand with a bike which has been abandoned here for weeks. Someone had their back wheel stolen and evidently just gave up. That’s one less cyclist. And a current modal share of 0.8 per cent following on from a modal share of 1 per cent might be interpreted as signifying that one in five cyclists in Waltham Forest has recently given up cycling. If so, who can really blame them?




























By the library this multi-purpose bin (litter plus dog turds) is sensitively located directly in the path of the footway studs for the visually impaired and in front of a bench for those who want to relax and stop awhile to inhale the bracing odour of faeces.



























And now it’s time to head off along cycling-friendly High Road Leyton. Can you spot the cycle lane?

new ‘universal cycle parking’ sign unveiled

As part of its review of national street signs, the government today unveiled this exciting new ‘realistic’ cycle parking provision sign, suitable for towns and cities throughout the UK.






















(Below) First two pics, cycle parking in Westminster; last two pics cycle parking in ‘cycling city’ York.

How a traffic-free High Road Leytonstone was subverted

High Road Leytonstone, which Sustrans has described as "cycling friendly"




I've been trawling through the council's archives and came across various policy documents. See how over a thirty year period a proposal to create a traffic-free High Road Leytonstone was watered down and finally destroyed in favour of car dependency gone mad.

1. 1980

The District Plan 1980 stated that

On completion of the M11 Link Road, High Road Leytonstone should be closed except for buses.

A very progressive proposal, which quite possibly resulted from a lot of hard work by local transport campaigners in alliance with sympathetic councillors. Now see what happened.

2. 1996

The Unitary Development Plan 1996 stated

On completion of the Link Road the Council will seek to exclude non-essential traffic from High Road and provide the opportunity to enhance Leytonstone Shopping Centre.

The proposal to exclude everything except buses has now been watered down but still excludes "non-essential" traffic, which implies (but does not explicitly identify) private cars.

3. 2005

All mention of restricting motor vehicles vanishes:

The Local Implementation Plan (Transport), Consultation Draft May 2005 stated that

The borough is committed to improving the street environment for residents, both in major town centres and ribbon developments on main roads.

‘Residents’ are now implicitly synonymous with ‘car owning residents’ despite the high levels of non-car ownership in the London Borough of Waltham Forest and the knowledge that car dependency is extreme in Outer London with massive use of cars for very short local journeys.

Urban regeneration is now identified not with traffic reduction or restriction but with car parking:

In Leytonstone new car parking spaces have been created. This comprises 95 off-street spaces and 40 short-term on-street spaces. Another 45 short-term spaces have been created in High Road Leytonstone, south of Church Lane.

4. 2011-12

The High Road Leytonstone Corridor Scheme (in association with Transport for London), to be implemented before the Olympics.

In the old days traffic schemes came with detailed drawings with specific measurements and figures. Nowadays in Waltham Forest it’s all glossy photographs and spin - generalisations with no concrete detail. For example, it is impossible to find out the width of the cycle lanes in this new scheme by scrutinising the available plans. Even the most detailed drawings currently on display in Leytonstone and Cathall Green libraries don’t provide that kind of information.

The scheme shows the extensive provision of free parking bays (a sample below). How many bays in all? This information is omitted from every single council document dealing with this scheme.





























Cycle lanes are to be refurbished alongside parking bays, as if ‘dooring’ didn’t exist (and even if a ‘safe zone’ is to be supplied – and there is no evidence that one will be – it won’t, on past form, be wide enough and parking in it will not be an offence).



































The zebra crossing is to be removed by Leytonstone station, to be replaced by ‘open space’ - sure to be a winner with the local minicab drivers who currently park in the cycle lane outside the station.

The scheme encompasses the area outside Harrow Green Library, which currently has no cycle parking whatsoever. However, the only parking deemed worthy of mention in this Corridor scheme is car parking. Cycling infrastructure is quite literally inconceivable to Waltham Forest’s transport planners, apart from the usual token on-road cycle lane.

There’s one other aspect of the scheme which overlooks the interests of anyone who wants to cycle to High Road Leytonstone. It blatantly indicates that these ‘improvements’ have been drawn up by planners who see the world through a car windscreen and who believe that economic prosperity and regeneration depend on providing as much on-street car parking as is possible. I won’t say what it is because it’s so obvious I’m confident that the local branch of the LCC with its detailed knowledge of local streets will spot it at once and demand changes to the plan.

Conclusion

It is worth asking what the driving force was (literally) in watering-down the traffic-free High Road Leytonstone proposal.

The answer quite simply is the borough’s transport planners and highway engineers, who are largely comprised of car-driving men who get financial help to buy cars and are financially rewarded for driving them. They also enjoy free workplace parking. Even though the London Borough of Waltham Forest is relatively small and can easily be cycled, the council is stuffed full of officers on “essential car user” allowances.

The drive to create an ever-more car-centric borough comes from the transport planners, not the public, and not even councillors. As I know from personal experience, even when campaigners can persuade councillors of the merits of schemes which curb car ownership and use, and even when those suggestions are enshrined in council policy, the transport planners simply obstruct them in every way possible. They are expert procrastinators. They simply wait until your favourite pro-cycling councillor has disappeared from the council – younger councillors tend to burn out quite quickly – and then dump the agreed policy.

Apart from walking and cycling being placed in the hands of car-centric transport planners for whom neither mode is at all personally relevant, the Blair local government reforms have further subverted public input into transport planning. Until fairly recently all traffic schemes had to be put before a transport committee and discussed openly before being voted on. This gave every resident and campaign group the opportunity to lobby councillors. Now all that has vanished, and traffic schemes are agreed behind closed doors between the officers and just one councillor, namely the cabinet member responsible for the environment. If this cabinet member is a weak councillor or an ill-informed one, then rubber-stamping becomes the order of the day. What then follows is a meaningless “consultation” process, like The High Road Leytonstone Corridor Scheme. Everything has been agreed in advance and your chances of getting any major structural changes are non-existent. At best you might squeeze a few cycle stands out of this scheme. Any tiny, parochial improvements on offer will only be those which do not impinge on the interests of drivers. And you will be regarded as mad if you suggest that High Road Leytonstone becomes a traffic-free street.

Five years ago the council did traffic counts on High Road Leytonstone which showed around 13-17,000 vehicles a day driving down it. These are relatively small numbers, yet they suppress cycling, clutter the street, pollute the air, and degrade the street for pedestrians. Motorists who drive to this street and park here for free are blatantly being exempted from the true social costs of their chosen transport mode. And their freedom to drive (hey, it's all about choice) crushes others freedoms, not least the freedom to cycle in a safe, direct, convenient and pleasant environment. There is nothing remotely attractive about cycling on High Road Leytonstone and that won't change after this scheme is implemented.

A street like this in Utrecht, with a population roughly comparable to that of Waltham Forest, would have almost no vehicles in it and 20-30,000 cyclists. This is a perfectly feasible scenario but one quite literally inconceivable to the kind of people who dominate transport planning across London. Unfortunately it is also inconceivable to lots of people who consider themselves to be cycle campaigners.

In short, The High Road Leytonstone Corridor Scheme is just another nail in the coffin of cycling, another contributor to obesity and air pollution, and another encouragement to the ownership and use of a car for short distances. Yet it could all have been so different, as someone understood 30 years ago.

scenes from a cycling revolution

The London Borough of Waltham Forest has an estimated population of 223,200.

At the heart of the borough is The Town Square Walthamstow, which is adjacent to the longest outdoor market in Europe and The Mall shopping centre, which has 850 parking spaces.

The Mall website naturally doesn’t consider the possibility that anyone would arrive by bicycle, so let me tell you that the Town Square has 24 cycle stands.

Oh no, sorry, eight of those stands have disappeared, leaving the sixteen stands shown above. There are nine beside the library and seven by the children's playground.

There were once three near the bank and another five alongside Bhs. All eight have now vanished. One angry local cyclist wrote to the paper about various disappearing stands, but received a soothing message from the local LCC branch. Six years and ten months later not one of those cycle stands has been replaced, and more have disappeared. Both the local branch of the LCC and the cycling officer Gina Harkell have proved utterly useless when it comes even to a simple matter like replacing cycle stands which are removed, though Ms. Harkell has a vivid imagination when it suits her.

Still, you could argue that it doesn’t matter. At 11 a.m. on a Saturday morning (i.e. yesterday) just three people had arrived by bicycle to do a spot of shopping. Whoever those two bikes belonged to, plus me.

Curiously, alluding to the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s cycling officer Gina Harkell, Mr Grumpy observes:

I would say that it feels like the lunatics taking over the asylum, but it is more like the lunatics have taken over the asylum, have formed a "centre-of-excellence" committee and are now part of an advisory team for other asylums.

Quite. I couldn’t have put it better myself, Mr Grumpy!

By the way, if you are wondering why so few people cycle into central Walthamstow on a Saturday in one of the leading local authorities in London in its commitment to introducing cycling facilities (which include what a revealing Freudian slip identifies as '20 miles of quite cycle routes' - 'quite cycle routes’ like this) it’s a complete mystery.

Here (below) is one of the roads which leads directly to the Town Square and the shops. It is four lanes wide at this point, with parking bays down both sides of the road. It forms part of the London Cycle Network, and has blue signs reminding cyclists of this fact. It also has bike logos painted on the road surface and you can see one in the photograph below, which was also taken yesterday. This road, Church Hill E17, gets the thumbs up from the local LCC branch as a cycling-friendly route for its traffic calming. It also forms part of a large 20 mph zone. It represents everything that cycling campaigners have ever fought for, and we must also thank the Cyclists Touring Club for so effectively defending our right as cyclists to ‘share the road’.

I think you’ll agree it’s a complete mystery why fabulous infrastructure like this is deterring people from cycling.

Leyton Bike Shed v. a Dutch apple

In Alphen aan den Rijn (no, me neither) they’ve just opened an ‘apple’ facility for leaving bikes at the station:

970 bikes fit within the bike racks in the "apple."

This brings the total number of cycle parking spaces at Alphen aan den Rijn station to 2850.

This foreign nonsense is unlikely to impress a British cycling campaigner. In Leyton, for example, the Central Line station is supplied with ‘The Bike Shed’, a fabulous piece of infrastructure which contains an awesome 16 Sheffield stands.

Unlike the Dutch apple, the Leyton Bike Shed entrance is protected by double yellow line 'no waiting at any time' parking restrictions, which ensure unrestricted traffic-free access to the Shed at all times, as can clearly be seen in the photo above.

The facility is also maintained to the high standards of cleanliness which you would expect from this Council (see below).

Sadly, the stained sheet of paper which was taped to the wall providing details of how to use this facility has long since dropped off but, hey, that's not a problem! The railings and fencing in the vicinity of the Bike Shed have bikes locked to them, which means that (i) the Shed was full so smartcard users were unable to access the facility, or (ii) these cyclists would rather not pay a fiver to park their bikes, or (iii) these cyclists reckon their bikes are safer on public display than tucked away in the shed.

Incidentally that comic publication known as The Waltham Forest Cycle Action Plan includes in its vision of the future:

Target 3 Provide secure ‘smartcard’ bike shed at Blackhorse Road station 2008/9.

Needless to say no such facility has been built at Blackhorse Road station. That’s cycling targets for you, folks!