The agenda for cycling and walking

It’s always an enlightening experience reading Council committee agendas (available at the Town Hall or in larger libraries). Tonight the ‘Transport Liaison Consultative Group’ meets. This committee which brings together local groups and individuals interested in transport issues, with eight councillors. The committee has no power to make policy and is essentially toothless. Judging by the list of organisations and individuals listed as being in attendance at the last meeting, only those with an interest in public transport turn up.

Item 43 on tonight’s agenda is ‘Cycling & Walking’. My hackles immediately rise at the category. Cycling and walking are two quite different means of mobility, with different interests and needs. I never trust any organisation which lumps them together. It invariably signifies that there is little interest in either transport mode, so they can be lazily lumped together and quickly and smoothly disposed of.

And what topics will be up for discussion under this category at tonight's meeting of the ‘Transport Liaison Consultative Group’ ? Any of the innumerable problems for local cyclists and walkers identified on this blog? I’m afraid not. Let me give it to you in full. The whole golden sentence.

The police had been notified of cyclists riding their bikes on pavements and the police would be clamping down on the issue concerned.

And now, next item: Olympic Update.

Footnote. The Chair of the Committee is Cllr Bob Wheatley. He is one of the few independent minded councillors left, so if you live locally and want to suggest some topics for discussion under ‘Cycling & walking’ you could always contact him.

Green council job vacancy!

Apropos of my previous post on ‘road safety’, below. The latest issue of the council’s free paper WFM includes an ad for an ‘Accident Prevention Officer’.

Waltham Forest is committed to reducing the number of casualties on the roads. We are looking for an Accident Prevention Officer to help deliver our Accident Prevention Safety Education Programmes.

‘Safety Education’ is the usual crap about teaching children to behave as responsible adults in a lethal road environment filled with drivers speeding, talking on mobile phones, and accelerating towards traffic lights at amber. And take special care when someone is approaching in a 4X4 with a bull bar fitted, because they can kill you even at speeds as low as 18 mph, and if they do it will be YOUR FAULT, you reckless and irresponsible child cyclist or pedestrian.

Once you buy into the concept that using lethal machinery (to wit: a motor vehicle) recklessly or irresponsibly is an ‘accident’, fostering the notion that violence at the hands of criminals is somehow unavoidable or excusable, then you are not helping to make the roads safer but perpetuating the status quo.

Oh yes, one other thing about this job vacancy with a progressive green council:

A full driving licence and the use of a car will be necessary as the post carries a car user allowance.

Flat Earth ‘Road Safety’

The aftermath of a smash on Lea Bridge Road.

The journalist Nick Davies recently published a blistering attack on the British press entitled Flat Earth News. It was enthusiastically reviewed by many fellow hacks.

One of Davies’s points about modern journalism is that

80% [of stories] were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry.

Yesterday saw a classic instance, as media outlets ranging from BBC News to the press credulously recycled the glad tidings from what purported to be a new road safety campaign group, the Campaign for Safe Road Design

The message of this new body is that

Serious crashes can drop by more than half when roads are given a safety makeover – for example, safe crossings, crash barriers at the roadside, turning bays at junctions and good hazard markings.

This is classic road lobby garbage. It blames roads for crashes, not drivers.

According to The Campaign for Safe Road Design, a consortium of the UK’s leading road user, road safety and road design bodies, and launched at the House of Lords today (8 July) a third of Britain’s serious injuries or fatalities on the roads are preventable over the next 10 years with just a modest investment – primarily in signs, lines, kerbing and barriers.

What is striking about this so-called Campaign is that it excludes cycling organisations (such as the CTC), organisations which represent pedestrians (such as Living Streets) and genuine road safety campaign groups like RoadPeace and Brake. This so-called ‘Campaign’ is just the road lobby in its latest incarnation and its purpose is to demand more spending on roads while diverting attention from such topics as the massive reduction in traffic policing, cars deliberately designed to travel at speeds vastly in excess of the speed limit and the widespread flouting of traffic law by huge numbers of drivers. And not a word about the absurdity of the government condoning hands-free mobile phone use by drivers even when its own advisers have shown this to be dangerous. In reality 'road safety' is shaped by politics and vested interests, not rationality. The Campaign for Safe Road Design is, you can be quite certain, passionately opposed to Safe Car Design, such as manufacturing cars which go no faster than 70 mph, automatic speed limiters, or black boxes which register speed and other data at the time of a collision.

‘Road safety’ is a deeply compromised ideology, shaped by the road lobby, not by victim groups.

The traditional Road Safety establishment is incapable of confronting the problem properly because it is itself compromised, directly or ideologically, with the culprit [car] industry. Thus it promotes devices to protect motorists from the consequences of dangerous driving while instructing children to flee the streets and cyclists to adopt pathetic measures to save themselves when being run over. The Highway Code (though necessitated by motoring behaviour) is generally ignored, save for the purpose of castigating cyclists. 'Road Safety' produced the term 'Road Accident' to describe the serious and sometimes fatal result of people using lethal machinery recklessly or irresponsibly, fostering the notion that violence at the hands of criminals is somehow unavoidable or excusable when performed with a car - a view confirmed in the courts with depressing regularity. It proceeds at base from an acceptance that motorists have a right to expropriate public space (the streets) and threaten others while in their 'private' vehicles; 'Get out of the way of cars!' is the road safety officer's unswerving theme.

What cyclists and pedestrians need is not ‘road safety’ but danger reduction:

The road danger reduction approach to achieving safer roads seeks to reduce danger at source. This calls for a recognition of the fact that the principal source of danger on the road is motor vehicles.

The best book ever written debunking the failed, blood-soaked ideology of ‘road safety’ and arguing for its replacement by danger reduction is Death on the Streets by Robert Davis. It is long out of print but you can pick up a second hand copy here.

Paradise Lost

Milton Road E17. The footway, which is supposed to be kept clear while building work takes place at this site, is both obstructed and strewn with bits of rubble.

The cyclist trap

Simply bait with cheese or chocolate to trap a cyclist. Recommended by 'Top Gear'.

(Forest Road E17, junction with Falmer Road. Yesterday.)

Cycle parking at stations

Above and below: outside Blackhorse Road station on the Victoria Line. The station has twelve cycle stands, which isn't enough. (Notice the cycling theme on that advertising panel.)




















Below: three photos showing the railings outside Walthamstow Central station (on the Victoria Line and also an overground station with trains to Liverpool Street and Chingford).


























































Walthamstow Central and Leytonstone tube stations have a locked facility known as The Bike Shed. To use them you need to register, supplying a passport photo, proof of address, and showing your passport, driving licence (sic) or National Insurance card, and pay £5 for a smart card. This is fine for daily commuters but plainly there are many cyclists who choose not to opt into this scheme.

(Below) The Bike Shed in the car park near Leytonstone tube station.

The waste land

LBWF trade waste sacks dumped by the cycle stand at the Bakers Arms junction (High Road Leyton arm). Saturday.

(Below) Pretoria Avenue E17. Saturday.





















(Below) Truro Road E17. Yesterday.