Inadequate pedestrian crossing time

New research has found that for many elderly people, pedestrian crossings do not give them enough them to make it safely to the other side.

You hardly need to be an octogenarian to find it difficult to get across a signalled crossing before the green woman sign goes back to red. Even an olympic athlete wouldn’t manage the Oxford Circus ‘scramble’ at green. Lighting phase time allocation is just one small aspect of the way in which transport planning systematically discriminates against pedestrians and favours motorists. It’s the kind of thing few drivers are even aware of, in a car-centric society.

Adding just an extra second or two to the overall crossing time could make all the difference, they claim.

Nearly 200 pedestrians over the age of 70 were killed on Britain’s roads in 2008, according to official figures.

But there’s an obvious solution. Get all these doddery old folk driving. Have you had a mild cardiac arrest or a few strokes, or perhaps have difficulty in seeing? Not to worry. The only person who has to verify fitness to drive after the age of 75 is the driver. And to help matters still further

The RAC Foundation called for road signs to carry larger lettering to help Britain's ageing motorists.

Only the most fanatical kind of environmentalist would argue that if you can’t read road signs, you obviously shouldn’t be driving.

Volcanic ash in Waltham Forest questionnaire

At severe risk to my health I was out on my bicycle today under a deceptively sunny blue cloudless sky which as we know is full of vicious Icelandic particles (FOREIGN DEATH CLOUD SWEEPS BRITAIN was the headline in yesterday’s Express, or something like it). I could hardly sleep last night, with the eerie silence and the strange absence of a jumbo screaming into Heathrow at 4 am, thanks to that nice Mr Brown increasing the number of night flights over London. (That’s another topic which that nice Mr Cameron and that nice Mr Clegg will have absolutely no comment on.)

Anyway, I came across this glorious testament to four years of the ‘war on enviro-crime’ fought by our glorious Liberal Democrat-Labour coalition council (and since ‘war on enviro-crime pics feature both Clyde Loakes and Bob Belam it’s no use the two parties blaming each other). Belgrave Road E17.

Seating for pedestrians is more or less non-existent across the London Borough of Waltham Forest, as you would expect from a car-centric Council which despises walking and cycling, but here is a rare exception. Isn’t it lovely? And it made me think: if volcanic ash was to shower down across the borough, would it (i) make things look worse (ii) make things look better (iii) make no difference at all to crap Waltham Forest. Please write down your answer and keep it until May 6th, after which you can chuck it away, as your opinions will then become worthless and all those people stuffing leaflets through your door or soliciting your vote will vanish, never to be seen again until 2014.

Greenwash crap

Yesterday’s Independent boasted The Green Awards

Including Greenwash like this:

The old internal combustion engine gets an unsympathetic press, but in the right hands it can be green.

Best car: BMW 320d Efficient Dynamics

If you want or need to drive your BMW hard it will take you to 60mph in around 8 seconds and on to a top speed of 137mph

Yeah, very environmental.

And doncha just hate being lectured on sustainability by multi-millionaire jet-setting celebrities (who are currently enduring unimaginable suffering thanks to an Icelandic volcano). It’s bad enough being lectured on diet by eight-homes long-haul Sir Paul McCartney. And now we have

Best celebrity: Natalie Portman

As part of Greening the planet

In 2007, she travelled to Rwanda

Something tells me she didn’t cycle there.

More misleading analysis from Transport for London

The spokesperson concludes, "Since 2000, there has been a 21% fall in the number of cyclists killed or seriously injured on London’s roads, compared to the mid to late 1990s. At the same time, there has been a 107% increase in the number of cycle journeys made on London’s roads in the past decade.

In the first place, anybody can cherrypick road casualty statistics to come up with the conclusion that suits them. The only valid comparison for the period 2000-2009 would be the stats for the period 1990-1999. The fact that TfL isn’t using them indicates a desire to massage the results.

Secondly, TfL prefers to leave out less serious injuries from its analysis, again from a desire to present a rosy picture of cycling in London. And once you go down the scale of injury, it’s known that the official stats are a serious underestimate compared with hospital admissions figures.

Thirdly, as this blog never tires of pointing out, casualty figures bear no relation to exposure to risk. In a capital city where huge numbers of drivers are steering with one hand while talking into handheld mobile phones – car drivers, van drivers and lorry drivers – the risks to cyclists have massively increased since the 1990s. On the other hand figures for fatalities and serious injuries may fall not because the roads are safer but because traffic jams, congestion and low vehicle speeds result in less serious consequences from a collision.

Fourthly, it’s garbage to say that “there has been a 107% increase in the number of cycle journeys made on London’s roads in the past decade” because TfL has never measured cycling on all London’s roads, only on a tiny fraction of one per cent of London’s roads.

Spin like this evades the reality that cycling to school continues to plummet in London because parents correctly perceive the roads as far too dangerous for their children to use.

As for the claim that The safety of London’s cyclists is a huge priority for both the Mayor and TfL and we are committed to making cycling in London as safe as possible.

That’s tosh because Boris stopped the funding for the Met’s lorry enforcement unit. TfL is a toxic car-centric organisation and absolutely no friend of the pedestrian or the cyclist. Even something as rudimentary as Advanced Stop Lines continue not to be enforced, and no one from TfL or the Mayor’s office has a word to say.

‘Proof speed cameras exist to rake in money as receipts finally fall’

You don’t need to be Ben Goldacre to doubt the science behind the Daily Mail’s latest hysterical headline.

Or the crackpot political slant:

Motorists have been hit with speeding tickets worth almost £1billion under Labour, a report shows.

No, not ‘motorists’ but ‘criminal motorists’. The corporate media endlessly represents speeding tickets and parking tickets as if they were an inescapable tax imposed on all drivers, rather than an entirely voluntary matter which the affected individual has chosen consciously to risk.

Critics said it was proof motorists had been treated as a cash cow. Claire Armstrong, cofounder of the Safe Speed campaign group, said: 'You should never measure safe driving by miles per hour.

‘Safe Speed’ is not a group but consists solely of Ms Armstrong who is, of course, fervently committed to speed-camera-free driving, i.e. even more carnage than currently exists.

The great ‘cycle superhighway’ farce

Let’s say it again. Cycling in London is going nowhere with joke infrastructure like this.

Via.

Woman cyclist hit by lorry on Southwark Bridge Road

A female cyclist was hit by a lorry on Southwark Bridge Road and taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

The accident happened at 8.50am at the corner of Union Street and police said that no arrests have been made at this stage. The cyclist is believed to be in her 40s.