Friday 25 October 2013

Think Of The Other Fella*

you don't need me to explain the risks of cycling around lorries, but how many cyclists have driven lorries? How many lorry drivers have ridden bikes? How many highway designers have cycled and driven lorries?

I recently went feral and drove a lorry, but it was for a good cause!  I had a 7.5 tonne lorry to shift a load of furniture from a closing down office to a local school. Not as big or as heavy as an articulated lorry or a grab lorry, but an awfully lot bigger and heavier than my bike!

I drove an Iveco Eurocargo, pretty much like the one below. The only additional feature was a mirror at the top of the windscreen so one can see what is immediately in front of the cab. This lorry and models like it are ubiquitous on our roads as delivery trucks and contractor's lorries.

Iveco Eurocargo. 2.4 metres wide (rear box width; plus mirrors),
about 8 metres long and with a 4 litre diesel engine, this is 
very different to driving a car, or riding a bike. 
Image from Auto Trader website.
A quirk of UK licencing history means that because I passed my driving test before January 1997, I am allowed to drive a rigid, 2-axle lorry up to 8.25 tonnes (Class C1). The law was changed in 1997 to require people wishing to driver larger vehicles to have passed additional driving tests in a bid to make sure that a minimum standard has been reached before letting people loose.

I digress. Driving a lorry is a real eye opener as a both a highway engineer and a person who cycles. I have driven this kind of lorry quite a few times, but I treated it as a learning experience as I got to drive on some main roads, back streets (to get to the school), a trunk road and even a motorway!

With a car, you pretty much have wheels at each corner and you sit behind the front wheels; with this type of lorry, the front wheels are a bit in from the corners, but you sit above them. The rear wheels are well short of the back of the vehicle and so there is an overhang of nearly 2 metres. This arrangement means that although the lorry is very manoeuvrable (with a good steering lock), the rear body overhang is an issue whenever you make any tight turns. I of course had the help from power steering and air-brakes, but the 5-speed gear box was manual and the heavy clutch pedal was hard work.

Of course, as well as the rear overhang, the front and rear axles are much further apart from each other than a car and so tight turns are much more difficult, requiring them to be taken much wider. When tightly turning left, you need to make sure you are well away from the nearside kerb, or you will mount the footway and hit anyone standing there. When turning right, you need to make sure that the rear of the vehicle doesn't hit anything because of the overhang - you especially need to be careful that the overhang doesn't "track" over the footway because of the risk to pedestrians and the potential to clout lamp columns!

When pulling out of a narrow access gate (such as at the school), both left and right turns are a pain because of the overhang; the lorry needs to be pretty much clear before you turn, or the gate posts get whacked. Pulling in parallel to the the kerb is pretty simple, but you need to be careful that you don't get too close to another vehicle parked in front, because pulling out means a tight turn and that back ends swings over the footway again - it is the same for buses, they need plenty of kerb-side to get in tight to the kerb and plenty to get out again.

Driving along, you are very aware of how tight those narrow multiple lanes are when approaching traffic signals. Narrow multiple lanes are there for stuffing vehicles through the junction and not for the comfort of lorry and bus drivers! With a lorry 2.4 metres wide and many lanes being down to 2.8 metres, there is not much to play with. When turning, you need to straddle the lanes to stop people over or undertaking because any vehicles near the rear of the lorry will get hit by the swinging of the body overhang. Pedestrian refuges and traffic islands are a little easier to pass as they are normally set to at least 3 metres in width, but at junctions, they are another thing you are trying not to hit.

On my outing, I did come across a few people on bikes. Although I came across them on main roads with a bit of space; overtaking properly really does need planning as you need to be well out from the person on the bike, with enough time to get well past them before pulling back in.


The London Cycling Campaign's Safer Urban Lorry concept includes
a lower driving position and bus-like glazed doors so that the driver
has a better all-round view, especially, the nearside blind spot.
Image from London Cycling Campaign.
Despite all of the mirrors (one main each side; one lower, very convex each side and one very convex at the top of the windscreen), there are blind spots. The front left corner is a a place where you can struggle to see what is going on and the advice about taking extreme care cycling up the inside of a lorry is well given. I found myself using the mirrors far more than I do with a car and this is a symptom of driving a wide vehicle with not much room to play with - you need to keep an eye on things all round. It would be very easy for someone to pass up your inside and get hidden in this blind spot while you are looking in the right hand mirrors. 

The other main blind spot is of course the rear. Being 6 metres or so long and rather wide you really cannot see a vehicle right behind you! I had to reverse several times to get in the right position for loading/ unloading and luckily, I had two people with me to act as banksmen. It made life so much easier when there are other sets of eyes, but of course, most people driving these lorries have no help when needing to reverse.

The final thing to say about the experience is that many car drivers are utterly oblivious to just the space needed around a large vehicle, including stopping distance. For example, I was on a dual carriageway doing just under 40mph, but still accelerating. Clearly I was not accelerating quickly enough for the idiot in the crew-cab pick-up who pulled round me into the outside lane and then back in front, on his brakes as he turned left up a side road. He obviously had no idea that I needed quite a lot of road to slow down. There is also the lemmings that appeared when I straddled lanes to turn left. They still had to creep up the outside which meant I had to let them pass before I could make the turn. Actually, motorway driving was the most comfortable and with a speed limiter (56 mph), it was almost relaxing - large roads for large vehicles!


Lorry swept path. The red lines are the tracks the wheels follow and
the green lines is the outside edge of where the vehicle body swings
as the vehicle turns - a larger envelope than the wheels because of
the overhang which is worse at the rear.
Image modified from Savoy Computing.
I get involved in all sorts of highway design for my day job and driving the lorry reminded me that these vehicles are more complex to drive than a car and that their operational envelope is far greater than their physical size. Highway engineers use swept path analysis software to test layouts for various vehicle sizes. I have covered the detail of this before, but suffice to say, those lines on the plan do mean the difference between hitting people and things or not!

As a cyclist, I am acutely aware of the visibility limitations of lorries and the risks of passing on the inside (although I do it when I can judge that conditions are safe). I am also very aware that a lorry moving to the right at a junction may well be just the first part of turning left; my driving experience reinforced this fact. There is a high level of task for lorry drivers to keep aware of what is going on around them with their mirrors and we all must realise that it is possible that they may not have seen us as cyclists. Throw in Boris Johnson's rotten Trixi mirrors and many lorry drivers will have more mirrors than their eyes can cope with.

It is a sad fact that many highway engineers do not cycle and cannot possibly know how their work affects people on bikes, even when they are meant to be designing for cyclists! I am willing to make a fair bet that most highway engineers have never driven a lorry and yet layouts have been produced and are being produced which force users of both modes to share the same space. At the very least, engineers need to experience cycling; perhaps highway authorities and consultants should keep a couple of folding bikes in the office? Politicians should also get some cycling experience as they vote on schemes or sign them off.

What about lorries? Anyone with newer licences won't be able to drive them and it would be daft to go to the time and cost of getting designers trained as lorry drivers. But, I think that organisations such as Transport for London should seriously think about setting up a scheme where engineers can go and drive a lorry on a private track to get a feel of the issues as part of a training scheme; after all, they run a scheme which includes lorry driver training from a cyclist's point of view.

Of course, the elephant in the room is that of lorries and bikes sharing the same space. If they were separated, then the cyclist wouldn't be getting into a dangerous position and the lorry driver would have one less thing to worry about.

There is a interesting twist to this, though. With less young people taking up driving as time goes on, the much talked about "peak car" and a skills shortage in civil engineering, might we end up in a position where people designing highway scheme are not drivers. We will of course have standards to follow, but will this be a future experience gap?

*Yes, I mean male and female, but I was trying to be clever with the title

Wednesday 23 October 2013

The Infrastructure That Will Power The Cycling Revolution

Not my own work, the title of this post, but the title of a lecture i attended this week at the institution of civil engineers, organised by its london branch. here is a roundup and some more opinion from me!

First, thanks to Katja Leyendecker for tipping me off about the lecture - she read about it in New Civil Engineer before I even got my copy! 

ICE HQ at One Great George Street.
Image from ICE
I had always planned a post in reaction to the lecture and I took my (wi-fi only) tablet with me to make some notes. It turns out that ICE HQ (the historic One Great George Street) has wi-fi and so I ended up tweeting what was being said which was a first for me being relatively new to Twitter. It turns out that the lecture was open to all, something which I found out after thanks to Space for Cycling; but I have no idea how many non members were there. For me, a welcome return to the ICE HQ - it has been some time!

The format of the lecture was an introduction and round-up by Rachel Skinner, the chair of ICE London's Transport Expert Panel with a series of presentations by industry experts all held together by the very entertaining Phillip Darnton, former chair of Cycling England and now with the Bicycle Association of Great Britain. There was also a few minutes for questions.

The lecture was often quite London-centric (being hosted by ICE London!), but there were lots of points of interest. The health warning for this post is that it is based on my tweets and so my take of what was being said. Of course, the speakers will have their own affiliations and reasons behind what they said. As ever, I encourage you to do your own research into the topics covered. My interpretations are shown in [square brackets].

Darnton's fellow panellists were;


Adrian Lord - Associate at Steers Davies Gleave and British Cycling's infrastructure expert

Dr Michéle Dix - Managing Director of Planning with Transport for London

Nicola Francis - Principal Delivery Planner (Cycling) with Transport for London


Lord Berkeley started by introducing the work of the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group and the recent "Get Britain Cycling" report, with a special mention of the group's co-chairs, Julian Huppert MP and Ian Austin MP. He went on to say that the UK needs to be spending £10 to £20 per head per year on cycling, but there was no such commitment from the governments so far and that the new Government appointments to transport would need to be on board following the loss of Norman Baker. He was clear that road space needed to be reallocated to cycling.

Phillip Darnton started his presentation with a side swipe at the loss of Cycling England [lost when the current Government abolished it as part of the austerity cuts]. There was an undertone that Darnton was very displeased about how cycling is being treated [my take]. He went on to suggest that we perhaps need to get away from looking at average modal share across the UK as a measure of success and concentrate on areas which are doing well as our base. For example, he cited Cambridge has having a cycling share of 23% for all urban trips and picked central London's bridges as being places with very high numbers of modal share for cycling [but see Joe Dunckley's health warning!]. It was very hard for him to provide a UK-wide picture because things are so variable.

He felt the challenge for the UK was to try and tackle people's love of the motor car for short trips and the car being a status symbol. whereas the rest if Europe is not so in love with the car. The UK has had a history of supporting its car industry and with so much vested, why would governments want to promote an alternative? Until 2009, he suggested that annual spend on cycling in the UK was 73p per head and silly party politics had each new government tearing up the transport policies of the previous ones. There are parts in the UK where there is a tradition of cycling and that may be why these areas are doing better. 

Darnton then mentioned that a report done about 17 years ago [sorry, I didn't note which one] raised the same things at "Get Britain Cycling" had, especially on political leadership [or lack of it - my take]. He decried the constant stop-start approach to cycling which has prevented learning within local authorities and so they ended up having to employ consultants which sometimes ended up with significant parts of funding being handed over [very close to me this point]. He felt that Norman Baker was the best minister for cycling in a very long time, but the government response [to cycling] was weak.

He then went on to suggest that the Prime Minister demonstrated a total lack of leadership and things will end up with the Treasury making decisions on "business cases", with ideas constantly being put back to provide further information. He said that the role of politicians is to provide leadership and "just do it". The constant changes of politicians and lack of continuity has led to us having cyclists (with a little joke about Lycra), but few people who cycle. Darnton concluded by stating that we are yet to start a cycling revolution, but we knew what was needed and how much it was going to cost.


Cycling in Westminster - only for the brave?
Adrian Lord was next up and he started with his take on the Olympic legacy and continued success of cycling as a sport which certainly is inspirational and may have got some people on bikes. He also felt that the price of fuel might have also got people cycling, but for those people, he posed, is it easy or safe? Lord explained that currently, 200 million journeys a year are now being made by bike in London which equates to 540,000 a day, but many of the routes are not safe and only for the brave. Taking the lane and cycling with traffic is no good for children and the elderly and women are put off by the MAMIL approach taken for cycling.

On safety, Lord suggested that while casualties are low, cycling doesn't feel safe and infrastructure gives up when it is too hard and it must be done right. We need to get away from the stop-start of provision at side roads, tackle junctions and if we really did go Dutch, most of the roads would need protected facilities based on traffic flow alone! 

Lord then went on to make some more points purposely using some slides of good examples in London, rather than those from other countries. He said that in certain parts of London cycles make up 50% of traffic flow. He felt that filtered permeability was needed and streets redesigned to make them look and feel different to motorists to reduce traffic speed. He was happy to see some good things in London such as cyclists being exempt from banned turns and no entries. He quite liked Royal College Street, although he felt it was a half-way house [between on-road cycling and protected facilities]. 

What he wanted to see was a consistent approach to protected cycling at traffic signals with separate stages, green scramble [all cycling movements getting green at ones] and early start [cyclists getting a green before general traffic]. He also wanted to see chamfered kerbs used where there is a kerb upstand next to cycle tracks and he cited other good work in the UK such as the floating bus stops in Brighton. He felt that the 5 Dutch criteria for cycling should be followed and spent some time going through them [coherence, directness, safety, comfort and attractiveness - please do correct me if I am wrong!]. He said if all of the criteria were met, but the route was unsafe, then it is a failure. On training and awareness, he still felt it had a place as a way of helping people to build confidence.

Michéle Dix started with the point that 80% of all trips in London occur on the roads [regardless of mode] and to look at how the roads are being used, the Mayor set up the Roads Task Force, which has broad representation within it. She stated that a sense of place is as important for streets as movement, but there are lots of competing demands. The RTF was given the aim of transforming conditions for walking and cycling, create better destinations, ensure the network was open for movement and access was there for servicing businesses and development.

A TfL road. Is this about movement (of traffic!) or place?
She set out the principle that streets can be for movement or for place and for any given situation, the street's function will be somewhere between the two, possibly one of 9 types [shown on a slide]. At one end of the scale, an arterial route will be all about movement and at the other, a quiet side road would be all about place. The challenge is places like High Streets where movement and place are both important.

She said that there were not enough roads in London [to meet demands on them], with many being narrow and so innovation might be required such as rationing of space by time of day or use of smart traffic signals as examples. Where new roads are provided, they may be for walking and cycling with some access. They might be provided to take traffic away from certain areas completely.

Dix then suggested that ideas such as night time deliveries had proved popular with hauliers during the Olympics and so it was time to look at some of the planning restrictions on deliveries. She stated that new connections to the road network were needed to facilitate growth and that people wanted the streets to be nicer, but not at the expense of movement. She made the point that not everyone could cycle and so their needs had to be catered for. She said that TfL welcomed the findings of the RTF and although noting that TfL was not the easiest organisation for people to deal with, they were investing £4bn (£1bn for cycling, £1bn for technology and £2bn for specific growth projects). She concluded by saying that TfL was looking at the business case for burying roads [presumably for motorised traffic!].

Nicola Francis started with an introduction to the Mayor's Cycling Vision which was frankly a bore for me which ended with a description of the network the Mayor wishes to build made up of Superhighways, Quietways, the Central London Grid and Mini-Hollands, demonstrated with a pretty poor map of London with apparently random lines and blobs.

With the Mini-Hollands, she explained that out of 20 eligible boroughs, 18 had submitted bids, 8 were short-listed to work them up in more detail and up to 4 would be funded. She showed the movement vs place slide, but acknowledged that continuous cycle routes were needed. Interestingly, she said that there were many people who did not know the "rules of the road" as taught to drivers because they hadn't taken up driving and this is where cycle training could help.

She then explained that TfL's Cycle Safety Plan would be published in the Spring with an outline of the aim to provide 80,000 cycle parking spaced in London by 2020 as a mixture of on-street, in schools and at stations. She said that TfL also wants to work schools and communities to identify barriers to cycling and by 2014, there would be 11,000 hire bikes.

For me, the most exciting and long awaited piece of news was that the revised London Cycle Design Standards (LCDS) would be out for consultation on 29th November and will be available via the TfL website! She went on to explain that consistent way-finding [for cycling] was important for TfL and she concluded that London had the political will, but needed help from its partners [I assume apart from certain London boroughs who will remain nameless!].


Main lecture over, it was time for a questions and answer session and most asking questions stated that they were London cyclists which was good. 


The first question asked if the UK could learn from overseas for helping walking and cycling, such as left turns on red traffic signals? Adrian Lord said that lots of things were being looked at; Nicola Francis said that the LCDS had been internationally benchmarked; Darnton observed that the Department for Transport was "very cautious and very slow" which got a laugh!

The second questions was about how minorities could be encouraged to take up cycling. Nicola Francis made a great point that the use of infrastructure could normalise cycling. She also said that targeted community work was needed to engage with the hard to reach.

The third question was to ask if TfL would subsidise cycling kit as it was expensive to start up. Michéle Dix said that if everyone was bought a bike, how many would be sold on! Phillip Darnton then recounted a story about a doctor wanting to prescribe cycling to a fat person, but was worried about the bike being flogged! More seriously, he and Adrian Lord talked about the benefits of community bike recycling in terms of affordability for bikes and giving the people refurbishing them new skills.

The fourth question was two in one; Potholes are a hazard to cyclists and having to swerve to avoid them put people off cycling; and cycle theft is a huge problem, especially with a poor response from the police. Nicola Francis highlighted technology as being a good way of reporting potholes and she explained that security was something the Roads Task Force has looked at and that TfL was running a pilot where new bikes can be registered at the point of sale. Phillip Darnton said that bike theft was often part of serious organised crime and the Metropolitian Police had 2,000 unclaimed bikes.

A pragmatic approach to bikes on trains is needed -
off peak use andfolded bikes may be the only things we can allow
with space at such a premium.
The fifth question was about taking bikes on trains at peak periods. Michéle Dix felt that because rail capacity was so tight and allowing bikes at peak would mean more carriages and platform extensions, it was not something being looked at. Lord Berkerley said that people had to be pragmatic and for those wanting to carry bikes, then folding bikes were the answer. Phillip Darnton praised the National Rail Enquiries app which has bike information as there is no uniform UK approach. He said that there were now 69,000 cycle parking spaces at UK stations and Michéle Dix mentioned the station bike hire schemes such as Brompton Dock [and Bike and Go - my comment]. Lord Berkeley said that the Dutch have gone for cycle parking at stations in a big way to try and keep bikes off trains.

Question six was about whether or not bus lanes should be 24-hours a day to help cycling. Michéle Dix felt that time rationing might be an option and possibly night time deliveries could help. Lord Berkeley mentioned a pilot scheme of parcels being delivered to railway stations for people to pick things up on the way home from work on the basis that it would reduce deliveries by road during the day which often find people out at work!

The final question was about driver training, starting with the bus drivers on CS7 where they are mixing with cyclists and getting frustrated! Nicola Francis outlined TfL's Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme which had HGV drivers getting on bikes. Phillip Darnton said that the driving test should include time on a bike to learn about the issues, but the DfT was not interested.


My views
Look, there was so much said, I am not going to write pages of analysis and views, so I will boil it down to the five things I took away from the lecture (in no order);

  • Protected infrastructure is key to powering the cycling revolution;
  • Political leadership is so desperately needed;
  • The loss of local authority knowledge and learning is a national scandal;
  • TfL is in turmoil over providing for cycling, but not wanting to reduce unrestricted access for vehicles - something has to give, even on a street by street basis;
  • I was really pleased to see perhaps 250 mainly young engineers, many who clearly cycle being enthused by the subject.

OK, a sixth one. Phillip Darnton is a very funny man and is plain speaking, but in an intelligent and reasoned way with facts rather than opinion at his fingertips!

Sunday 20 October 2013

If we are going to do it properly, let's plan it properly first!

Despite the general doom and gloom about a lack of funding for cycling, I seem to have been spending quite a bit of time looking at very early scheme ideas for funding bids, but I am also worried.

I have been looking at a strange mix of potential Quietways for bids against the Mayor's Cycling Vision, a couple of routes to leisure destinations, a major upgrade for a main road and some ideas for linking the areas around schools together in local "Network Clusters" (hey, I just coined some jargon!). It has also been great to get out on two-wheels for work as how else can you design for cycling if you sit behind a steering wheel or a desk all the time?

The big worry for me is that we always seem do this back to front. What seems to happen is that we have a vague idea of what we want to do, make a funding bid, get too little money and end up with a fudge. The political horizon is too short and politicians want to make their mark quickly. Take Boris Johnson.

Classic political "easy win" - the Trixi mirror. Department for
Transport successfully lobbied to allow them and now they are
popping up all over the place because they are cheap and
it shows that "something" is being done. This is not cycling
infrastructure and should not be praised as such.
In his first term, he did little for cycling in terms if infrastructure other than a couple of blue paint jobs called Cycle Superhighways (with some rebranding of other people's work). He did get the cycle hire scheme off the ground, but it remains loss making (which is a debate in itself about the costs of public transport).

His second term saw the release of his Vision (in March, a year after getting re-elected) which is actually a fair policy and in the main it makes sense. He has set out his broad objectives. Of course, the vision came as a result of a heck of a lot of lobbying and campaigning and he is now itching to get things implemented - third term perhaps?

A lot of people (myself included) cannot wait to get things getting built, but in the rush, I am worried that we are going to mess it up again. Politicians and senior management types often enthuse and gush about "quick wins"; the "low hanging fruit" and other such vacuous cobblers.


An Advanced Stop Line (ASL) outside 197 Blackfriars Road,
otherwise known as Palestra, the home of Transport for London's
Surface Transport Team amongst others. There is so much space
on this street, but where are the cycle tracks?
What they really mean is that a proper job is difficult, it will take a long time, it will take a lot of money and it will take a lot of effort to win people round. In essence, they may well not be around when things start on site and so how will they take the glory? The easy wins are great as they get "things" built or installed for the photo opportunity, it allows them to say we are getting on with the job. It is often little more than window-dressing.

"Shovel ready" is another terrible political term being bandied about which assumes that local authorities have shelves full of schemes ready to go. In reality, "shovel ready" schemes will be those which throw money at resurfacing a carriageway or changing the lanterns on lamp columns - probably needed, but not new schemes.

Don't get me wrong, I really like small interventions if they are the right answer at the time, but we cannot transform cycling with just little schemes. At some point, we are going to have to tackle big issues and pull out the big civil engineering toys. For example, lots of places have street networks which converge at bridges where roads cross other roads, railways or waterways or the streets are crossed themselves.

This is a bridge which has been around for decades, but had no
pedestrian or cyclist access 
from day one (unless you fancied
walking or cycling on a 40mph 
road). There were three
solutions to getting a new route over this 
bridge; widen the
bridge to create space for a cycle track; build a 
new bridge
parallel to this one or narrow the carriageway to create a 
3.5m
shared-use unsegregated cycle track together with replacing the
bridge parapet for a higherone (so cyclists didn't fall over he
edge!). Widening the bridge was 
not structurally feasible, a new
bridge was a million-pound scheme 
and so the third option was
chosen which cost less than £200k and 
could be delivered within
the funding time limit. Was this the best solution? No, but is it a
fair compromise to get the network linked up? Possibly.
It is not often that we find spare space to play with at these locationsand so the stark reality is that we are going to have to make serious changes. We may need to widen or rebuild bridges to create cycle tracks or even build new bridges for walking and cycling. We are going to have to cross busy roads or run alongside them and we may well have to get other people involved who will not be marching to our programme.

Take Network Rail. If any work needs to be done near the railway, it will call the shots. If you are doing bridge works over a railway line, you will be restricted to what you can do and when you can do it. Lifting a new bridge over a railway may mean booking space 18-months in advance or even longer to coincide with a planned works blockade (such as Christmas!).

In London, Transport for London's traffic signals unit has a 14-month lead in to new traffic signal schemes. Elsewhere major planning applications take 13-weeks to determine (if you are lucky), utility diversions can take months to programme, highway authorities need at least 3-months' notice for major works, the list of issues external to the immediate scheme can be huge.

Copenhagen have been delivering their cycling infrastructure for years
and it shows all across the city. It is clear that some of the layouts
are compromises which are at the expense of cyclists and
pedestrians, but they have tackled the difficult such as the bridges.
On one of the schemes I have been looking at, I was asked for rough costs many months ago to help inform a bid which I gave, but with a list of caveats and recommended that a proper feasibility was done. 

All went quiet for ages and then I was asked to do a more detailed feasibility, so I got out on my bike and had a proper look. I remained fairly happy with my original estimate, but then I was then told that far less had been awarded for the scheme. What is the point of awarding funding for a scheme which is less than the bid? Why not fund less, but better schemes?

In London, the Mayor is pressing on with his vision and he is pushing boroughs to get their ideas for Quietways in to TfL as soon as possible. Bearing in mind, the vision only came out in March and nobody really knows what he and the Cycling Commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, wants. 

The London boroughs are being pushed hard to deliver on a plan which has not been developed beyond the "vision" stage and very little is being done on looking at the feasibility of the routes being chosen (it does vary between boroughs of course). Until and unless the difficult parts of the cycling network are identified early and work to deal with them starts early, then we are utterly wasting our time delivering easy things which remain in isolation.


I am quite happy to see this type of "easy win" to open up networks
to cyclists which are restricted to other vehicles. But, these
networks will have to interact with main roads at some point!
If we are serious about building proper infrastructure, it will cost us a lot of money, but (and I would say more importantly) it will cost us a lot of time. If the right answer to a barrier is a new bridge or a tunnel, or traffic signals which cut back vehicle capacity, then we need to spend the time getting proper budgets together and time to win people over. If the right scheme needs 3 years to deliver, then so be it. We have waited this long after all. 

As for the money, well if the government was not so intent on spending billions on road widening and a high speed white elephant, there would be more than enough to deliver proper schemes.

Wednesday 9 October 2013

Barking, Bazalgette, Camden & Canals

OK, I promised a post on route planning this week, but I have been sidetracked (again). Last Sunday was blazing hot and so I took the opportunity to explore a bit more of london on two-wheels.

Outer-London is hard work for cycling and those who have read this blog before know that I like to do a long run into Town every so often. I couldn't do my usual run to Borough Market on Saturday, but with a great weather forecast for Sunday, I made Camden Town my destination. The route I picked made for a very interesting and slightly lost day out!

Much of The Northern Outfall Sewer is built within an embankment
so that there is a fall from one end to the other. This is one of the
tenets of civil engineering - shit flows downhill!
Image from Sewer History website.
So, with Ranty Junior in tow, we threw the bikes in the car and headed to our favourite starting point at River Road, Barking, one end of Cycle Superhighway 3. Yes, I know this was a cycle ride, but the car got us to a safe starting point, which is a little sad. The reason for starting here was that I wanted to ride the East London Greenway which runs from Beckton Sewage Treatment Works to just beyond the Olympic Park.

I was then planning to ride through Victoria Park to pick up the Hertford Union Canal and then in turn the Regent's Canal which would take us to Camden Town, with a little bit of a diversion at the Islington Tunnel where the canal is not accessible by bike. I was then planning to go and take a look at Royal College Street which has been revamped for cycling, before heading home. In all, about 28 miles and the longest ride for Ranty Junior.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette.
Image from New Civil Engineer.
First, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, an unsung hero of Victorian civil engineering who built a huge network of sewers in London during the mid to late 1800s with the network still very much in use today. 

Read up on his fascinating story for yourself, but the point of mentioning him is that his Northern Outfall Sewer, still in use for its original purpose, now doubles as a fantastic route for walking and cycling - the East London Greenway.

The Greenway makes use of the sewer embankment to provide a direct leisure route between Beckton and Stratford and is in effect, a linear park. For cycling, the ride quality is pretty good for the most part, but there are plenty of interruptions by roads and many gates to go through (much of it is closed overnight as with other parks).


The start of the Greenway at Beckton.
Wide, surfaced and quite Roman in it's approach to geometry.

Interrupted by the A13 and the first of several horrible gates.
As safe as cycling gets for kids.
The barriers are getting really stupid now.
One of the several toucan crossings on the route, this one at
Prince Regent Lane.
The sewers and therefore the Greenway crosses roads and railways.
Here, it is crossing the railway between Plaistow and West Ham.
Approaching Stratford. The Greenway is now marked with a cycling
area by the concrete surface.
Apart from the irritating and badly arranged gates and the toucan crossings which took an age to change, we reached Stratford High Street. 

Pausing for a few minutes for a rest, I took a couple of snaps of the extension to Cycle Superhighway 2 which will run in mainly protected areas between Stratford Town Centre and the Bow Interchange.

I will reserve detailed judgement until it is finished and I have ridden it properly, but at a first glance it looks pretty wide (at least the bit I looked at), but I am not sure about the high kerbs and pedals!

Westfield Avenue. Similar layout to CS3 and when it is not cluttered
by trees and street furniture, it is not too bad. But, the layout does
prioritise motorised traffic.
This was when the route went wrong. The Stratford section of the Greenway was shut for Crossrail works and I couldn't find any diversion signs. Luckily, I vaguely remembered the route I took during a ride in the summer which was somewhere behind Stratford City, so off we went.

There are lots of new roads either built or under construction around the Olympic Park area which is going to be massively developed over the next few years. With a clean sheet, this should have been the best in the UK, right? Sadly not.

Traffic gets (empty) dual carriageways, roundabouts and gentle curves. Cyclists get bollards, crash barriers, closed areas, trees, lamp columns and uneven setts to play with. There are toucan crossings around, but many are staggered. 

Tons of #space4cycling here!
Eventually, I worked out where we were and after using a section of tow path along the River Lea and River Lead Navigation, we headed on to Victoria Park via the St. Mark's Gate.
Wide, surface roads run through the park (not for traffic) and there was plenty of space. The unexpected warm sunshine brought lots of people out to walk, run and ride away from traffic.



Early on an October Sunday and the cycle parking was already
getting busy.
The Park Cafe. Lamb samosas for breakfast - yum!

After our rest, we carried on through the park and joined the tow path of the Regent's Canal Canal, which would be our route all the way up to Camden. A nice thing to see was a Legible London sign to get our bearings.

I have mixed views about using the Regent's Canal. Sure, it was pleasant and interesting and being a sunny day, well used. That was the problem - as well as having to be careful where I was going, I also had to watch out for Ranty Junior who was running a fine line between falling into the canal or hitting the walls and fences. Plus, at the same time, we were both dodging pedestrians, cyclists going too fast and erratically controlled hire-bikers.

Actually, I found the whole experience exhausting and I while the canal gives a good off-road route, I think its popularity will be its undoing. It is not wide enough, the surfaces are highly variable and frankly, it should be left for pedestrians. 

It is tranquil here, but soon becomes a game of dodge everything!
The Mayor's Cycling Commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, has said that the Canal & River Trust (which looks after the canal) and its tow paths would play an important role in the the Mayor's Cycling Vision. From what I saw, unless this includes filling in a strip of the canal to provide a wide tow path suitable for the numbers wanting to use it and reconfiguring locks, the money would be better spent developing parallel low traffic or traffic free routes. Sorry, but that is how the experience left me.

The A1 Upper Street. No #space4cycling here. Plenty of space for
car parking though!
The tow path ends at the Islington Tunnel which meant heading up to the mean streets of Islington, the 20mph Borough. After getting a little bit lost, we got to the A1 Upper Street which is one of Transport for London's Urban Motorways. It was horrible and so we got off and walked, using a pelican crossing a little way along as we were aiming for Berners Road which was a cul-de-sac which cyclists can use to cut through to Bromfield Street. These back streets were quite nice and many closed to through traffic.

Bromfield Road, looking back at Berners Road. A good little example
of filtered permeability.
Cloudesley Road, looking towards Cloudesley Place.
The deterrent paving is designed to physically stop cars from driving
through the gap, but could be passed with care by a fire engine.
We then got a bit lost again and ended up getting to Royal College Street by accident after going down the horrible York Way. As the 20mph speed limit was being universally ignored, we walked and navigated by bus stop maps and then cycled along Agar Grove.

I have been concerned about Royal College Street which has been redesigned. Previously, it had a bidirectional cycle track on one side of the street and with the road being one way. As I understand it, the issues with it were lack of capacity for cycling as it was so popular and confusion about priority at the junctions.

The Armadillo (nee Zebra) in its full recycled PVC glory!
The new layout retains the one-way working for traffic, but now has a cycle track in each direction on each side of the road, protected by a mix of planters, parking bays and "armadillo" (known as "zebra" in their native Spain!) traffic delineators.

My worries with the layout were cyclists using an area of the footway by the bus stops in the street, sharing it with people boarding and alighting as done in Copenhagen.

I was also worried about pedestrians tripping over the armadillos when informally crossing - I am less worried now after riding the street as there are zebra crossings for pedestrians on desire lines coming from side roads. The bus stops were no problem to use, but it was a Sunday. I have no idea how it links to the wider cycle network and so I call it as I see it!


So, I remain a tiny bit worried about both of these issues and I wonder how well the planters will be kept, but having used the layout, I think it works for the location and at one point a faster cyclist was able to nip out of the cycle track to overtake us. We then went onto Camden Market and then retraced our route, even finding a better way through the Crossrail site.

Ranty Junior enjoyed Victoria Park best as he didn't have to get through the gates and crossings of the Greenway. He also liked Royal College Street as he felt safe. For its faults, I liked the Greenway. I didn't like the canal tow path and of course, the highways geek in me liked the filtered permeability in Islington and now, I am a fan of Royal College Street - plenty of ideas to kick around for the day job!