please empty your brain below
Most of my experience of London’s roads is as a cyclist, occasionally a bus passenger and very rarely as a motorist.
The Highway Code are the rules of the road and its basic premise for cyclists is that they will always be the slowest moving road users. However, as we all know, there are numerous times and places in London where the reverse is true: a two wheeled vehicle will move faster than the cars, vans, buses etc. that are stuck in a jam.
So, it is an everyday occurrence that the Highway Code cannot be applied in London and road users have to make it up as they go along – a very unsafe state of affairs. Couple this with the increase in the popularity of cycling, a few very influential blogs (see Tom Edwards’ 6 March post on BBC London) and some very high profile accidents (most infamously at Bow Roundabout) and the result is schemes like this.
Is it the right answer? As a cyclist, yes. For London? Possibly. If it gets more people out of cars and onto bikes, yes. If it doesn’t, then it will just make Bow a less pleasant place to live and travel through.
But when TfL makes it safer to cycle, fewer people will drive and more people will choose to cycle. This makes journeys by car and bus FASTER because there are fewer other cars in the way. Similarly, journeys by bicycle will be SLOWER as the cycle lane clogs up with bicycles.
So a more accurate model of the costs of the scheme should be the other way round: car drivers and bus passengers will not lose out. Pedestrians will win too because it's easy to accidentally kill a pedestrian with a car but almost impossible to do so with a bicycle.
TfL proposes changing the way it models economic costs and benefits of road schemes to reflect this and I agree.
Oh, and what about the reduced pollution when people cycle instead of driving? TfL also currently fails to model reductions in the 4,000 people killed by traffic fumes every year in London, but their thinking is due to change on this soon too.
If they are successful in significantly increasing the modal share of cycling they will need to provide less (more costly) transport infrastructure and services for the remaining non cyclists.
Regardless of costs and benefits shouldn't protection be provided to vulnerable road users as a matter of course?
I imagine it would be possible to come up with a scheme for Stratford High Street that did not have a negative impact on bus journey times, but TfL have chosen not to do this as the impact on other traffic would be too great.
As a pedestrian, my overwhelming experience of cyclists is that they have absolutely no idea what the Highway Code is.
Schemes like this continue to fawn over them at the expense of everyone else, and will just make them even more blasé about basic road safety and manners, as they sail through red lights in the dark wearing nothing but black clothes, with a tiny intermittent LED clipped to their arse.
Do everyone a favour and ban them.
I agree. The driver slowing down on approach to green traffic lights in anticipation of them going red is my particular annoyance.
Hang on a second - could that possibly mean that trying to lump a large cross section of the population together just to have a go at them doesn't really work? Surely not.
For those that are set in this anti-cycling stance - look around. There are more cyclists on the road from a wider cross section of society. Certainly in London, the behaviour and compliance with road laws increasingly reflects that. Sure, there are still those who flout the law and endangers others. AS DOES EVERY SINGLE DRIVER THAT USES INAPPROPRIATE SPEED DOWN SUBURBAN ROADS. You cannot condone either activity, but I know which one is the more dangerous to life and limb. Why is there so much hysteria about cycling, so little about speeding?
Making the roads safer and more pleasant for cyclists will also make them safer and more pleasant for people - all of us.
Your linked photo is a bit of misleading propaganda. The ratios of roadspace shown for the coach users vs car users is approximately correct, but bicycle users will not in real life ride in the tightly-packed phalanx illustrated, people go at different speeds and some of us wobble more than others.
As for lack of investment in public transport - London Buses alone had an operating subsidy of approx £700,000,000 in 2008-9.
The intended experiment ought to be tried to see if cycling numbers will then 'take off' - you can justify it on that basis alone without needing to rely on half-truths or insults.
It is amazing that TfL are going ahead with this despite the farcically wrong modelling. As others have mentioned, the effect of making a safe environment for cycling generally makes its slower as you have more people doing it and you don't have to pretend you're Chris Hoy to keep up with the traffic to prevent yourself getting killed.
Additionally, all known experience of traffic engineering has shown that reducing the space available to cars means that few journeys will be made by that mode.
http://www.copenhagenize.com/2013/03/closing-streets-to-cars-for-good.html
I hope the scheme goes ahead and is a success (it has its heart in the right place at least) but if this is to become the standard, and cycling truely taken seriously as a transport mode, TfL are going to have to get much more savvy with their modelling.
One reason people jump red lights is that in London it is statistically safer to do that rather than weight at a green light (and then get killed by a left turning lorry)
Please do not forget that London is probably the nastiest city in Western Europe with regards to pedestrians; 80+ of us are killed every year, by motorists, not cyclists.
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