please empty your brain below
Good to see some street clutter being removed.
The railings are low enough to climb over so only stop the less agile people from crossing.

John | 07.01.12 - 7:34 a.m. | #

Removing guard rail isn't just being done for fun but after trials elsewhere, most notably in Kensington High Street, where the conventions were first broken by a brave K&C council. They realised that, contrary to what you might imagine, there's no evidence that guard rail improves safety. For example, virtually all pedestrian crossings in London had 16m of guard rail on either side, based on a 1970s GLC standard. Why 16m? Absolutely arbitrary, it's simply 8 panels of 2m length which felt about right, but was never reviewed after the event to see if it did indeed reduce accidents. All that expense of installing, maintaining, painting and replacing guard rail, and for what benefit? No-one quite new.
What's more, the presence causes certain types of accidents that don't occur when it's not present, most notably cyclists have been killed by being squashed against guard rail by HGVs, when without it they may have simply ended up on their side on the pavement, perhaps grazed but alive. 
So the new guidance is to use it only if there's a clear risk of pedestrians straying into a dangerous piece of road. 

SELondoner | Homepage | 07.01.12 - 7:53 a.m. | #

Great news, that last time I was in London, I was amazed by how much street furniture there is.

Michael in the Netherlands | 07.01.12 - 11:29 a.m. | #

Given the amount of times I've seen people vault the guard rail to sprint across a road - or walk in the roadway inside the guard rails to cross where they want - this has got to be a good thing. Guardrails are also a crushing hazard for bikes - without them, if they have to, they can at least get onto the pavement to avoid a turning lorry. So hopefully there won't be a need for more ghost bikes to be chained to the non-existing railings. This is one TfL initiative I can applaud

disgruntled | Homepage | 07.01.12 - 11:44 a.m. | #

Westminster are doing the same around Victoria - which really suffers from a surfeit of guard rails.

I wonder how much money the councils will make from the scrap metal. Maybe it's time for a FOI request.

Ed | 07.01.12 - 12:32 p.m. | #

Edina Monsoon would be delighted:

"...and I was just trying to live my bloody life - you know, get from A to B, and do a little shopping - only to find that in fact life is controlled poorly by bits of bloody, bloody buggery bits of paper. I mean, why can't life just be made a little bit easier for everybody, you know, I mean why do we play bloody taxes? I know, you know, to buy railings to put outside bloody shops so stupid people can't run into the bloody road, but you know, we're not all stupid. We don't all need nursemaiding. I mean, why not have a stupidity tax, just tax the stupid people!"

lockedintheattic | Homepage | 07.01.12 - 1:00 p.m. | #

I distinctly remember that there was well done research in the 1980's showing that railings and other roadside clutter did not improve safety - in fact, the converse. I do not forsee any accidents occurrings as a result of their loss. Accidents caused by reckless cyclist though, there may be a few more of them.

B | 07.01.12 - 1:29 p.m. | #

There already is a stupidity tax. It's called, according to political affiliation, the lottery, tobacco, or homeopathy.

swirlythingy | Homepage | 07.01.12 - 1:31 p.m. | #

Good! There is far too much street clutter these days.
Besides squashing cyclists and being ignored by pedestrians, surely they also stop emergency services from getting to the various premises easily from the road too.
I wouldn't want to be lifted over a metal railing on a stretcher, nor raced down the road to the nearest crossing either!

CornishCockney | 07.01.12 - 5:49 p.m. | #

The new crossing that was built outside the Business Design Centre in Angel was sans guardrails from day one. But it still has an inexplicable zig-zag in the middle. I assumed it was so that a change of policy could accommodate them without major reconstruction.

Dan | Homepage | 07.01.12 - 6:36 p.m. | #

Just an extra point - guardrails can also be a crush hazard for pedestrians, if they try to squeeze between them and traffic, in particular long vehicles that are turning.

| 07.01.12 - 11:20 p.m. | #

At Angel, most railing have now been removed and it has improved the area massively. It also of course, reduces the costs to keep them maintained. All in all, a surprisingly good idea.

BJD | 08.01.12 - 11:14 a.m. | #

Wait till they do a "Exhibition Road" to your local main road.

Rick Berej | 09.01.12 - 6:46 a.m. | #

Perhaps we should encourage a campaign to get people to manufacture makeshift crossing guard 'lollipops' which could be simply left by the roadside and used whenever people wanted to cross?

mikey2gorgeous | 09.01.12 - 11:01 a.m. | #











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