RosieBell

Brightness falls into the air

The most famous verse about plague is Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence. 

Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die –
Lord, have mercy on us!

Metaphorically, darkness has fallen in a time of anxiety. Literally, the air has never looked brighter and clearer. In a fine Spring the colours of flowers and young foliage are intense and the air is clean. In the highly polluted parts of the world eg Delhi they have seen blue skies; in China the smog has cleared from their mega-cities and they can see the stars.

It’s as if the world has been newly washed.

The pandemic’s impact on the environment has been staggering. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are heading for a record 5.5-5.7% annual drop. From mid-January to mid-February, China’s carbon emissions fell by around 25%. In Delhi, a city with often the worst air quality in the world, pollution caused by PM2.5s reduced by roughly 75% as traffic congestion dropped by 59%. A 70% reduction in toxic nitrogen oxides was reported in Paris, while satellite imagery showed nitrogen dioxide levels in Milan fell by about 40%. In the UK, road travel has decreased by as much as 73% and in London, toxic emissions at major roads and junctions fell by almost 50%.

In my city the air pollution has fallen by 50%.

You can see it; you can smell it. The car-farting that was part of the background of getting round the city suddenly becomes noticeable from one individual vehicle.

There is plenty of evidence that polluted air exacerbates the chance of dying of Covid-19.

researchers in the US are building a case that suggests air pollution has significantly worsened the Covid-19 outbreak and led to more deaths than if pollution-free skies were the norm. As well as predisposing the people who have lived with polluted air for decades, scientists have also suggested that air pollution particles may be acting as vehicles for viral transmission.

I like to imagine that citizens will demand clean air as being essential as clean water and clean disposal of sewage – that is, that an aberration will only be tolerated if it is temporary.

What else has changed is the use of urban space. A pretty, cherry-tree lined street near me which was once a challenge to cross now has joggers running down the centre white line. On other streets children play. On the arterial route where we have had a long, exhausting campaign to get a mile of cycle lane, there are now children cycling and the Council is considering emergency measures to build a far longer cycle lane instead of the convoluted compromise that we had battled for (see an account of this here). 

The shared walking and cycling paths have been crammed; people are therefore using the streets as they should be used. They are looking at the masses of tarmac that had been taken over by single-occupancy cars and wondering why they couldn’t walk or cycle safely. And so the demand has come for more space, instead of pedestrians and cyclists being jammed at the edges for the convenience of the motor vehicles.

The bike shops have been selling out, my bike repair guy was working until 11pm to fix the bikes that had been rusting in garages, and the docking stations for hire bikes have become empty.

To accommodate streets now busier with bikes, as well as facilitate social distancing, some places have installed temporary cycle lanes or closed streets to cars. Pop-up bike lanes have appeared in cities including Berlin, Budapest, Mexico City, New York, Dublin and Bogotá. Governments from New Zealand to Scotland have made funding available for temporary cycle lanes and walkways amid the pandemic. In Brussels, the entire city core will become a priority zone for cyclists and pedestrians from early May for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, temporary street closures to cars have taken place in Brighton, Bogotá, Cologne, Vancouver and Sydney as well as multiple US cities including Boston, Denver and Oakland. In England, restrictions have been lifted to enable and encourage councils to more quickly close streets to cars.

Large areas of London are to be made car free. The Council in my city has been closing off some streets for use on foot and cycle and are in the process of repurposing more. Emergency powers are being employed to take measures which used to grind through the laborious planning process. The UK government is pushing councils to produce pop up lanes and urging commuters to commute by cycle.

Active travel campaigners are dazed. The dream we have been chasing for decades suddenly materialises at the bidding of unlikely politicians - the wider pavements; filtered residential areas; cycle lanes on arterial routes; slow car speeds - anything that removes the domination of the car and making exercise as part of getting about instead of something done in gyms. If you want to see a crowd of slimmish, healthy people, go to a cycle demonstration. (Obesity is another condition that makes you more vulnerable to Covid-19.) This is our big break that has arrived after years of toil. But we may of course lose this opportunity as we return to some kind of normality and people hop back into their cars again, in fear of public transport.

Chris Boardman, the former Olympic champion and Greater Manchester’s first Cycling and Walking Commissioner, says that the 1950s level of traffic has made a nice environment, but that can only be continued by a change of transport policy.

we are at a crossroads and we could go either way, and I don’t know which way it is. For the first time we genuinely have a real choice, we could change our transport culture, the way we use our streets.

The pandemic has upended our society, as a war would, and after a war revolutions come. 1945 brought in a Labour government and the welfare state, which had been proposed for decades and demonstrated in other countries eg Michael Savage’s New Zealand of the late 30s. 

Of course we all hope for a future that resembles our desires. Socialists point to the rise in estimation of obviously useful jobs like nurses, cleaners, carers and bin collectors along with the general co-operation as proof of the desire for a better, more sharing society. A libertarian Facebook friend extols the local delivery of various goods like meat and vegetables instead of the supply chain, with a whiff of caveat emptor for hygiene control. A Conservative predicts the end of the expansion of universities and media and gender studies degrees. George Monbiot suggests changing to an eco-education.  And John Gray, ever the happy pessimist, looks forward to a time like Russia’s civil war with cannibalism on the table (so to speak).

I have modest visions. I have to say I would quite like to get back to my normality which includes my workplace village of office gossip, a coffee machine and two big screens instead of a poxy little laptop for working from home. With the addition – that commutes will be short; workplaces scattered; shopping more local; streets far more free of cars and every damned front garden space paved over for car storage dug up and used what it was intended for – flowers and vegetables.

I have a right because I have

 I’d been having thoughts about the “right” to own a car and a place to park it. Two things I’d observed:-

1. A friend who loves to do up classic cars– ahh if the only car owners were those who really did love automobiles.
2. Loki the Scottish rapper, winner of the Orwell prize for his book, Poverty Safari. He tweets sense normally and engages civilly with Unionists. This has made the madder Nats accuse of him of being a sell out with subsequent abuse, which he meets robustly.  However, when he started to complain about the lack of parking in his area, he stopped tweeting on the subject– he didn’t know he’d get such a furious response from the sustainable transport gang. He, who had seen his childhood poverty in a larger social context, could not see his car in the same way. 

I was slowly formulating, “Cars as luxuries for hobbyists or the rich would be like Lear jets or private helicopters. You may object about how they are obtained by unequal wealth but the damage they do is limited. It was when cars became necessities for mass transport that they turned into the barbarian hordes of city destroyers that they have become.”  Health, education, sewerage systems, electricity, postal delivery, even broadband, they should be distributed and available and affordable, when they are not free, to all.  Cars, and the infrastructure they require – no.

Yesterday I posted on Facebook a link to an article about the conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians in shared space.  I got this comment:-

SC:- - More cyclists wanting every stretch of tar to themselves.

Cyclists asking for the kind of safe, connected space that motorists and pedestrians take pretty much for granted get furious reactions. It is the Bounderby fury that workers petitioning for a half day off on Saturday and a work day of 12 instead of 14 hours are sybarites, calling insolently for a life of leisure. It is the anger of the unthinkingly privileged being challenged. 

The comment thread then followed the path familiar to cycling activists, with the mythical road tax being evoked.  SC’s last comment is:-

“Yes local taxes pay towards the roads but the car drivers tops it up massively with the extra tax imposed on them compared to a cyclist. And not every car in a city only transports one person. It's a human right to have a choice to drive cycle walk or run and should be bullied out of driving because of higher and higher taxes and insurance only drivers pay . As for space a car uses its the same as a cyclist because the highway code is give a cyclist the space of a car.”

He has been asked to consider the space taken by 10 cycles parking vs 10 cars, 10 cycles pulled up at the lights vs 10 cars and has not yet responded.  The “human right to have a choice to drive” phrase is a marvel, equating car ownership with the right not to be tortured or subject to arbitrary arrest. It is a wonderful demonstration of a privilege being perceived as a right – which is why debates between drivers vs sustainable transport types are so bitter and angry.  Drivers aren’t just put out that they may not have it all their way in the future – they view themselves as victims of a gross injustice, like women denied the franchise.  

This essay by Andre Gorz eloquently said it all back in 1973.

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one.…

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one...

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn’t a car occupy scarce space? Doesn’t it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn’t it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car and that it’s up to the “government” to make it possible for everyone to park conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots.

Andre Gorz goes on to make a variety of points that are now commonplaces among sustainable transport campaigners:- 

• car ownership has turned cities into sprawls with increasing distances between shopping, work and schools, which reinforces the reliance on the car;
• mass ownership of cars jams up cities so that the car goes no faster than the bicycle at rush hours (observable any commuting day);
• that cities made hellish by cars have to be escaped from by cars;
• highways have been developed at the expense of public transport;
• oil magnates have seized much power in producing car dependency;
• there is a paradox in that while cars give a sense of independence their owners are far more dependent on third parties like garages and mechanics than with earlier means of transport, and the workings of car are a mystery to most. (That last point I think specious – you were dependent on wheelwrights and blacksmiths in horse-owning days, and in my youth every young bloke tinkered with an engine.) 

His solution is the green Utopian one of local neighbourhoods growing their own food that are so fully integrated and agreeable that no-one wants to leave them –a radical and unlikely reshaping of our cities, which have always had districts – whether tanning and copper beating in other times, or these days, finance and the “old town” i.e. the tourist area.  Variety and specialisation within a city are a city’s strength.  As so often, someone who can forcefully express a problem, may sound weak when expressing a solution.

But that’s a cavil – Gorz wrote this in 1973 when city centres were still getting knocked down for ring roads. His point is that you cannot talk about transport in isolation – that when considering transport you have to consider what kind of city people should inhabit, and how they should relate to each other.

And better a green Utopia than the Divine Right of the status quo.  

DISTINGUISH carefully between the two,
This thing is yours, the other thing is mine.
You have a shirt, a brimless hat, a shoe
And half a coat. I am the Lord benign
Of fifty hundred acres of fat land
To which I have a right. You understand?

I have a right because I have, because,
Because I have—because I have a right.
Now be quite calm and good, obey the laws,
Remember your low station, do not fight
Against the goad, because, you know, it pricks
Whenever the uncleanly demos kicks.

I do not envy you your hat, or shoe.
Why should you envy me my small estate?
It’s fearfully illogical in you
To fight with economic force and fate.
Moreover, I have got the upper hand,
And mean to keep it. Do you understand?

The Justice of the Peace
Hilaire Belloc: in “Sonnets and Verse.”

Sofia, Bulgaria

Sofia, Bulgaria. Not as charming as Plovdiv, but still pretty nice, in its centre anyway. Again, a variety of architecture. What impressed me most was the underpass under the Boulevard Kniaz Aleksandar Dondukov. There is the Roman street of big slabs – seems you can’t strike a spade in the Balkans without digging up something that the Romans built – but also the underpass is an agreeable space with shops, totally unvandalized and very clean. As well as the Roman bricks there are portions of a painted interior of an orthodox church with a few offerings on the little altar – can you imagine how long that would last here?

Also a view of a hefty, rebarbative building of the communist period from the underpass.

Byzantine. Under Communism churches were often concealed by other buildings. Lenin’s statue has been replaced by Saint Sophia, as in Tbilisi he’s been replaced by Saint George.

Bulgaria makes a lot of products from rose petals. These are popular with tourists, and they waft rose scent in the streets and underpasses.

City gardens. Civilisation is a public space, where even the beggars can beg unmolested, the buskers busk, the limping and swollen old sit in the sun, the eccentrics flaunt their off-beatedness, and friends take a selfie of themselves with the bride at her modest wedding.

Bric-a-brac market in Sofia, Bulgaria, near Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. I sneaked these photos of one stall. Most stalls had Nazi stuff - postcards and busts of Hitler and swastikas on drinks flasks. Very unsettling seeing casual heaps of images which are taboo in our culture. My sister picked up an army shoe cleaning kit in excellent condition. Leather case with swastika stamp and shoe horn and brushes inside. She shuddered and wiped her prints off the case.

 

The 365 tour of Sofia was excellent, the guide an actor with colloquial English and an actor’s instinct of audience. I asked him about the Nazi stuff at the bric-a-brac stalls and he said that it was mostly repro. Talked about Bulgaria’s involvement WWII – either allying with Germany or be invaded by them as a route to Greece; stalled the transport of the Jews eastwards to death. Some bombing by the Allies of the city centre.

Bathhouse from 1900s, now museum

He also spoke with pleased anticipation that Ryanair and other cheap carriers were flying to Sofia. I shuddered at that of course. The beer here is cheap.

Sitting in Sofia airport on the way home I could hear a chorus of flat voices, “It’s coming home, it’s coming home.” It was Friday and I wondered if the first stag parties were on their way.

Sofia, Plovdiv, Kavala – waiting for the tourist euro – economic salvation meaning the spoiling of their cities.

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

I'd like to be magisterial and say The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley is the definitive work, or as comprehensive a book as you can find on the history of Britain's railways. I'd like even more to be the happy pedant, pointing out lacunae in the description of how Britain adopted the standard gaurge against Brunel's broad gauge. But I know almost nothing of railways, though I love travelling by train, so have to come to this book as the general reader of a well-written, entertaining piece of social history that cites novelists and poets as well as engineers. Simon Bradley quotes the book-making Victorians – Dickens, Trollope and Surtees as well as films like Brief Encounter, The Railway Children and the opening scene of a Hard Day's Night, where the Beatles dodge their screaming fans “behind poster hoardings and into telephone boxes and photo booths” in the cluttered concourse of the 1960s.

 

Bradley's book tells a big story – the technical development of the railways and their social impact, and embroiders it with fascinating details eg the contents of the luncheon baskets and the placing of toilets, the slight ring underfoot on the Southern Railway's preferred concrete over timber platforms. He devotes a whole chapter to signals, which doesn't stoke my boiler, however, his writing flows and he never loses sight of the human beings – in this case, the solitary signal-man on duty in his box. He explains the sensible height of British platforms (set at 915mm i.e. 3 feet) with a step or two to the train compared to the steep climb on the Continent. He gives the reason why Cambridge station is such a trek from the town centre because the dons feared loss of control of undergraduates and pulled strings to ensure that the station was built well over a mile away from the town.

Former platform on National Cycle Network 1

The railways created their own kingdom “a physically separate domain, in thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws.”

Cyclist on National Cycle Network 1

Simon Bradley was a young train-spotter – not just of the locomotives but of those working on them. “Driver and ganger alike belonged nonetheless to the world of proper work, visible and practical and comprehensible – a world away from the office-bound lives of most of our own fathers.” He conveys the excitement of the Victorians as this great force entered into their lives, as transforming as computers and the internet in ours. The landscape was altered with embankments and tunnels and viaducts.

Detail of former railway bridge, now carrying cyclists and pedestrians

He points out that bridges were a relatively rare sight before the railways came. Oldest bridges were almost all bespoke structures. Only when canals arrived were bridges multiplied to standard engineers' design. Now their striding arches are one of the splendours of the British landscape. (For cantilevered iron, the Forth Bridge beats the preening Eiffel Tower any day of the week, and how much finer the Glenfinnan Viaduct is than pompous static showoffery like the Arc de Triomphe.)

Viaduct on the National Cycle Network 1

“Part of the fascination of the railways is their permeation with memories and traces of obsolete working routes, and the human lives and destinies they shaped. The physical record is often patchy, because different aspects of the system have changed and developed at wildly varying speeds. The modernised freight network envisaged by Dr Beeching is already utterly lost; the diffuse small-scale system which he knocked for six is more remote still. Yet the bridges, tunnels and earthworks that carry the twenty-first century traveller are still predominantly those the Victorians witnessed take shape.”

Bradley moves beyond the Victorians and their share-owned competing railway companies through to British Rail and to today's mess of ownership – state subsidy of dividends to share-holders:-

“The old British Rail system was subsidised between 1 billion and 1.5 billion. Subsidies since this time have reached as high as 6.3 billion….Much of this money comes nowhere near the operating side of the railway, but is sucked straight out again in dividends, administrative and legal costs ,inflated salaried and bonuses. Nor is the system cheap for its users. [Grossly expensive, and Byzantinely complex in fact.] All of these features are intrinsic, not accidental, parts of the business model under which the railways were privatised – a process that,… was meant to address the supposed scandal of a public opened system which required high subsidies in order to operate. It has proved an extremely expensive way of saving money.”

Though Bradley does follow to the modern age via the marshalling yards and the change to diesel, it is the Victorians and Edwardians who dominate from when the technology was innovative and exciting.

The new words such as stoke, shunt, siding, running out of steam, on the right lines. Time, once set by the “guildhall and town hall and church steeple” was set by the “power of capital”. The landowners were challenged and there would be battles between the surveyors and navvies and estate workers where theodolites would be smashed. (In Middlemarch there's just such a scene – not quoted by Bradley.)

As the railways developed they were felt at the time to be as unstoppable and transforming as our own digital revolution. So in Trollope's Rachel Ray set in Devon, which was late to be connected, the timid matron Mrs Ray says of her journey to Exeter:- '“I thought the train never would have got to the Baslehurst station. It stopped at all the little stations, and really I think I could have walked as fast." A dozen years had not as yet gone by since the velocity of these trains had been so terrible to Mrs. Ray that she had hardly dared to get into one of them!' ' There are obvious comparisons with the elderly of today who once wondered at the young's sci-fi interweb thing now complaining of the speed of their Skype.

The railways have been with us for long enough to have created their own archaeology. I live across the road from the busy Edinburgh to Glasgow line, which I walk or cycle under every day. My commute goes past an embankment which was once a line and is now the National Cycle Network 1 cycleway. On the route are ghosts of platforms and you are riding unaware over a viaduct which is visible from the street a hundred feet below. There was a railway yard, now a place for billboards (advertising was a huge feature of Victorian stations). Another part of it is scrubland which the Council is planning to turn into a further cycleway, restoring a bridge or two.

Once a railway line, now scrubland, future cycleway

The living railway, Glasgow to Edinburgh line

When I see the great nineteenth railway structures – the viaducts, the Forth Bridge, the grander railway stations, I feel that we are lesser beings living in the half ruin of a mightier civilisation. We don't build such grandeur any more but conserve with our heritage industries, our endless touristing.

Bradley's last chapter is about the volunteers running old lines. He describes a “steam-hauled express arrives from a visitant from the another world, a sort of industrial unicorn or dragon.” Crowds gather to view this icon of another age, as beautiful and obsolete as a full-rigged man of war.

“Made vivid again, here is something that transcends Nature, an amazing work of man; what H.G Wells, writing in 1901, proposed as the best symbol for the century that had just passed, 'a steam engine running upon a railway.”

The Flying Scotsman

The city exists for the care and culture of men

Mumford's The Culture of Cities (1938) has some harsh things so say about the centralising effect of the railways and points out how they cut through countryside and cities with an imperial force. The railway in Edinburgh grabbed half of Princes Street Gardens and when I cycle through the old cuttings in the suburbs, now cycle paths, there is a sense of how divorced they are from the surrounding topography – they slice through it – as much as motorways and over-passes do .

Mumford saw the possibilities of the motor car opening up parts of the interior to regionalisation, near water sources and on hills where railways could not go.

Chapter V

“But it is not power alone that has brought with it the possibility of a new industrial, and therefore an essentially different urban, structure. The same holds for systems of transportation and communication. The motor car has decentralized transportation as radically as the transformer and the motor have decentralised the applications of electric energy. Instead of the train, which increased in economy up to a point with the number of cars attached, we have begun to employ, since 1910, the motor car, the motor bus, the motor trucks: a more flexibly used individual unit, which can start or stop, take the high road or the branch road, at its own convenience, without waiting for other cars. And instead of the railroad line, with tended to centralize transportation along the main arteries, and which was more or less confined to the water level routes, at grades of two per cent or less, the motor car has brought into existence the new highway network. Thus the motor car can penetrate the hinterland in a more effective and economic fashion than the railroad could: for economy in railroading depends upon loading the tracks to maximum capacity and confining transportation, as much as possible, to the main routes. Moreover, the motor car can climb steep grades and penetrate hilly country with a freedom unknown to the railroad; and it makes an effective connecting link with the airfield and the airplane. . .

The motor car has potentially opened up new frontiers of human settlement, even as the airplane has extended the outposts of civlization to the very poles. For the uplands, which motors reach so easily, are the seat of the fast-running young rivers and waterfalls, the new sources of power; and by means of motor car and hydro-electric plants areas that have been hitherto remote and unculitvated can now support well-balanced industrial communities.”

So that's the motor vehicle opening up the wilderness in the Highlands of Scotland, for instance, though I'd say that the “well-balanced industrial communities” aren't the money spinners up there (excluding the guys tending hydro-electric stations) so much as the driving tourists.

So in 1938 Mumford had an heroic vision of the internal combusters bringing industry and wealth to the remoter areas, with consequent regional development and the building of small cities among hilly landscapes. He didn't envisage then what mass ownership of the car would do to the existing old cities. Twenty years later he smelt the fumes of mass transport in The Highway and The City (1958) and warned his British readers not to repeat the American experiment:-

“There is, however, one matter that – particularly since the Beeching report on railways appeared – I regret not having dealt with in greater detail: the shrinkage and growing paralysis of the railway systems, and the idiotic notion that the best way to modernize transportation is to wipe out the branch lines of those once fast and efficient carries, the so place the entire burden of transportation upon the private motor vehicle, further covering this error by the even greater blunder of building motor expressways wholesale. This is a major threat to the sound design and well-being of cities.

On this matter, our disastrous American experience with mono-transportation by automobile, which has already gutted out the interiors of our great cities, should be of some service, if only your planners and administrators would take note of the dire results. Unfortuntely, your leaders in transportation are now,,, extravagantly planning to imitate all our mistakes...

Your cities.. will be transformed into extravagant parking lots; . . .you may dismantle the one kind of transportation that would, if properly organized, rescue from this fate: the railroad.

..The congestion that railroad transportation produced in metropolitan areas was excessive: hence the great promise of the automobile forty years ago was that, with its flexibility of movement and its ease in climbing grades that the railroad balked at, it would round out the rail system and produce complex regional transportation network that would provide for a more even distribution of population and industry, instead of the prevailing “apoplexy of the heart and paralysist at the extremities.

Those of use how eagerly advanced this possibilty.. made one miscalculation; we did not realize that dynamics of finance would concentrate on the newer mode of transportation, adroitly giving rise to the religious culture of the motorcar: and that, in the face of common sense, the transportation experts would attempt to do away with the railway and attempt to perform its functions even within heavily populated areas, by means of private motor vehicles...

The current policy of wiping out every other means of transportation than the motor ar and the airplane has been fatal both to the habitability of cities and to economy and efficiency in transportation..
[Preface to the English Edition]

Mumford goes to lament the colonisation of the cars spoiling the old cities - parking in the Place Vendome in Paris and spoiling the townscape of Amsterdam and keeps exhorting Europeans to learn from the American grim experience of “midtown garages, arterial highways, and overpasses and underpasses... “ and to pay heed to the law “the more facilities are provided for the motorcar, the more cars appear”... He lists various measures against the colonisers but says they are palliatives. “The main issue is that the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city. We still habitually sacrifice all the special values of the city to the function of motor transportation, as during the nineteenth century they were sacrificed to the railroad and the factory.” 

No city can solve its transportation problem if it neglects the greatest self-propelling vehicle of all: the pedestrian. A hundred thousand pedestrians can cover half a mile in a faction of the time that sixty-six thousand motor vehicles, each carrying one and a half persons … can carry them. And at the end of their walk, they would, even if they all suddenly decided to sit down, require a similarly minute fraction of the motorcar's wasteful parking street.” (1961)

Mumford has nothing to say about cycling except that the mild congestion that many cyclists caused should have been a warning what motor vehicles could do.

The last essay in The City and the Highway was written in 1957 and is a horrified response to how transportation that relies on the car has distorted lives and cities:-

"In transportation, unfortunately, the old-fashioned linear notion of progress prevails. Now that motorcars are becoming universal, many people take for granted that pedestrian move­ment will disappear and that the railroad system will in time be abandoned; in fact, many of the proponents of highway building talk as if that day were already here, or if not, they have every intention of making it dawn quickly. The result is that we have actually crippled the motorcar, by placing on this single means of transportation the burden for every kind of travel. Neither our cars nor our highways can take such a load. This over-concentration, moreover, is rapidly destroying our cities, without leaving anything half as good in their place.

….What's transportation for? This is a question that highway engineers apparently never ask themselves: probably because they take for granted the belief that transportation exists for the purpose of providing suitable outlets for the motorcar industry. To increase the number of cars, to enable motorists to go longer distances, to more places, at higher speeds, has become an end in itself. Does this over-employment of the motorcar not consume ever larger quantities of petrol, oil, concrete, rubber, and steel, and so provide the very groundwork for an ex­panding economy? Certainly, but none of these make up the essential purpose of transportation. The purpose of trans­portation is to bring people or goods to places where they are needed, and to concentrate the greatest variety of goods and people within a limited area, in order to widen the possibility of choice without making it necessary to travel. A good trans­portation system minimizes unnecessary transportation; and in any event, it offers a change of speed and mode to fit a diversity of human purposes.

Diffusion and concentration are the two poles of trans­portation: the first demands a closely articulated network of roads—ranging from a footpath to a six-lane expressway and a transcontinental railroad system. The second demands a city. Our major highway systems are conceived, in the interests of speed, as linear organizations, that is to say as arteries. That conception would be a sound one, provided the major arteries were not overdeveloped to the exclusion of all the minor elements of transportation. Highway planners have yet to realize that these arteries must not be thrust into the delicate tissue of our cities; the blood they circulate must rather enter through an elaborate network of minor blood vessels and capillaries.

[I really just want to quote the whole of the essay]

we must keep most of the proposed expressways in abeyance until we have done two other things. We must re-plan the inner city for pedestrian circulation, and we must rebuild and extend our public forms of mass transportation. In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is. Before there was any public transportation in London, some­thing like fifty thousand people an hour used to pass over London Bridge on their way to work: a single artery. Railroad transportation can bring from forty to sixty thousand people per hour, along a single route, whereas our best expressways, using far more space, cannot move more than four to six thousand cars: even if the average occupancy were more than one and a half passengers, as at present, this is obviously the most costly and inefficient means of handling the peak hours of traffic. As for the pedestrian, one could move a hundred thousand people, by the existing streets, from, say, downtown Boston to the Common, in something like half an hour, and find plenty of room for them to stand. But how many weary hours would it take to move them in cars over these same streets ? And what would one do with the cars after they had reached the Common? Or where, for that matter, could one assemble these cars in the first place ? For open spaces, long distances, and low population densities, the car is now essential; for urban space, short distances, and high densities, the pedestrian.
Every urban transportation plan should, accordingly, put the pedestrian at the centre of all its proposals, if only to facilitate wheeled traffic. But to bring the pedestrian back into the picture, one must treat him with the respect and honour we now accord only to the automobile: we should provide him with pleasant walks, insulated from traffic, to take him to his destination, once he enters a business precinct or residential quarter. Every city should heed the example of Rotterdam in creating the Lijnbaan, or of Coventry in creating its new shopping area. It is nonsense to say that this cannot be done in America, because no one wants to walk.

…

There is no purely local engineering solution to the problems of transportation in our age: nothing like a stable solution is possible without giving due weight to all the necessary elements in transportation—private motorcars, railroads, airplanes, and helicopters, mass transportation services by trolley and bus, even ferryboats, and finally, not least, the pedestrian. To achieve the necessary over-all pattern, not merely must there be effective city and regional planning, before new routes or services are planned; we also need eventually—and the sooner the better—an adequate system of federated urban government on a regional scale.

Until these necessary tools of control have been created, most of our planning will be empirical and blundering; and the more we do, on our present premises, the more disastrous will be the results. In short we cannot have an efficient form for our transportation system until we can envisage a better permanent structure for our cities. And the first lesson we have to learn is that a city exists, not for the constant passage of motorcars, but for the care and culture of men.

The state of the roads

I've just finished Beatrice and Sydney Webb's English local government: The Story of the King's Highway.

It's very readable, with well-chosen quotes and quite vivid in places, given that it's a fairly dry subject. The hero of it is Macadam, the capable administrator who had energy that would have made him fortunes or conquered territories in other lines of work and which he used on getting the roads built and maintained.

You can feel the Webbs' exasperation with the lack of organisation and sense behind the management of English roads. The ineffectualness of local bodies, numerous and small. The Acts passed in Parliament that were badly drafted and badly implemented. The corruption and amateurism of the Turnpike Trusts, with their surveyors who knew nothing about road building and the administration and mortgages swallowing up the money that should have gone on to actual road maintenance. No wonder the Webbs fell in love with the centralisation in the Soviet Union and Five Year Plans.

Meanwhile Irish and Scottish roads were managed better through central control – hangovers from Ireland's colonial position and the Jacobite rebellions.

I can now see why the state of the roads was as discussed by Jane Austen's characters as the price of rail travel and Underground routes are discussed today. It was a kind of shared element that everyone has to swim in.

The turnpike roads though were noticeably better than the local parish roads. I've been reading Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour (1852) and the characters there are very aware of when “having cleared the rushy, swampy park, they came upon the macadamized turnpike” - I.e stone based smooth surface fit for carriage wheels.

“Jawleyford Court was twenty miles from Woodmansterne as the crow flies, and any distance anybody liked to call it by the road. The road, indeed, would seem to have been set out with a view of getting as many hills and as little level ground over which a traveller could make play as possible; and where it did not lead over the tops of the highest hills, it wound round their bases, in such little, vexatious, up-and-down, wavy dips as completely to do away with all chance of expedition. The route was not along one continuous trust [ie the Turnpike Trust, a body of incompetents who would manage a stretch of main road] but here over a bit of turnpike and there over a bit of turnpike, with ever and anon long interregnums of township roads, repaired in the usual primitive style with mud and soft field-stones, that turned up like flitches of bacon. A man would travel from London to Exeter by rail in as short a time, and with far greater ease, than he would drive from Lord Scamperdale's to Jawleyford Court. His lordship being aware of this fact, and thinking, moreover, it was no use trashing a good horse over such roads, had desired Frostyface to put an old spavined grey mare, that he had bought for the kennel, into the dog-cart, and out of which, his lordship thought, if he could get a day's work or two, she would come all the cheaper to the boiler.”

I suppose the rail travelling public would have had as smooth a journey as we have over longer distances, then for the short journeys in the countryside it would be rough surfaces for mountain bikes only.

The carriage drives over a sound, hard road through the park at a spanking pace – those gravelled roads that we see in period dramas with the period hoof sounds and the rolling wheels. (I have to say that cycling along avenues round a mansion is some of the most agreeable I've ever done – Glamis Castle was the last one. Good gradients and magnificent views.)

So then they leave this and get into the “deeply-spurlinged, clayey-bottomed cross-road” and through the mire. “Bump, bump, jolt, jolt, creak, creak, went the vehicle.”

Being a member of a Turnpike Trust had status.

'Oh, nonsense,' replied Mrs. Jogglebury; 'we can entertain him well enough. You always say fox-hunters are not ceremonious. I tell you what, Jog, you don't think half enough of yourself. You are far too easily set aside. My word! but I know some people who would give themselves pretty airs if their husband was chairman of a board of guardians, and trustee of I don't know how many of Her Majesty's turnpike roads,'

…
When Mr Jogglebury is outraged by an insult:-

“It damaged the respect inspired by the chairmanship of the Stir-it-stiff Union, to say nothing of the trusteeship of the Sloppyhocks, Tolpuddle, and other turnpike-roads.”

So journeys were broken by stopping at toll gates to pay the charge:-

"Bilkington Pike now appeared in view, and Jog drew in as he spied it. He knew the damage: sixpence for carriages, and he doubted that Sponge would pay it.

'It's no use going any (wheeze) farther,' observed he, drawing up into a walk, as he eyed the red-brick gable end of the toll-house, and the formidable white gate across the road."

[I'm fascinated that “the damage” was used as “cost” then. I thought it was a modern slang term. Now hotels produce bills called The Damage.]

As a trustee Mr Jogglebury was allowed to go through tollgate for free if attending a trustee meeting. If not, he had to pay 6d like everyone else and there's a droll scene where his guest Mr Sponge pretends he's left his wallet behind, then seethes while the slow Mr J takes forever to pay, get the change and then a ticket.

"Then he [the tollgate keeper] had to look out the tickets, when he found he had all sorts except a one-horse-chaise one ready--waggons, hearses, mourning- oaches, saddle-horses, chaises and pair, mules, asses, every sort but the one that was wanted. Well, then he had to fill one up, and to do this he had, first, to find the ink-horn, and then a pen that would 'mark,' so that, altogether, a delay took place that would have been peculiarly edifying to a Kennington Common or Lambeth gate-keeper to witness."

Much local travelling then was finding routes that avoid the tollgates, as cyclists find routes that avoid the dual carriageways. This kind of orientation has stayed in British brains. Bill Bryson observed that when discussing a journey with the English by car they would go into endless detail on best routes – “take the A30 to Stockbridge then the A303 to Ilchester or the 361 to Glastonbury via Shepton Mallet”.

I suppose the Satnav has destroyed that part of the British brain though cyclists happily discuss routes and surfaces on forums for weeks at a time.

Incidental nonsense, bicycling nonsense

When the Plebgate story broke, cyclists were staunch. Though it's neither big nor clever to swear at the police, a cyclist's right of way had been unreasonably impeded. 

According to the law books, there is a right for all Her Majesty’s subjects at all seasons of the year freely and at their will to pass and repass the public highway without any let and hindrance. (Read the rest for how the police have taken control of access to Downing Street).

Everyone was partisan about Plebgate. As one of Radio 4's misnamed comedians said on last night's News Quiz, it was a hard choice between the Tory toff, and the Sun and the Met.

Chris Mullin (ex Labour minister) had thought it was a fit up by the Police Federation.

Describing his own run-in with the Federation, which, he said, had sought to have him removed as chairman of the Commons' Home Affairs Select Committee when he raised questions about the probity of the police disciplinary system, he said: "The Federation is a bully.

... 

It has a long track record of intimidating ministers, journalists and anyone else who gets in its way. It also has a track record of defending the indefensible.

 One of the policemen standing at the gate agreed.

 Ian Richardson said the initial confrontation after Mitchell tried to leave Downing Street on his bicycle was a “nonsense incident” that spiralled out of control, in part propelled by the political aims of the Police Federation.

 …

 If senior officers had read his notes from the evening, Richardson said, it might have saved a lot of trouble: “I think it could have been put into perspective. It could have been said that it was a minor incident that’s been leaked to the newspapers, and let’s move on. But, of course, we didn’t move on, and we ended up at the high court last week and this week. It’s a great shame. And at what cost to so many people.”

 “Nonsense incident” meets the case.

 After a sequence of events of apology and investigation, suing and counter-suing. Andrew Mitchell ended up in the libel court, and what it hinged upon was whether he used the word “pleb” or not.

I was convinced in a comments thread that a toff however annoyed would not use “the archaic, pantomime word "pleb"...As soon as I read that I knew there was something wrong...it sounded exactly like somebody's caricature fantasy about what an angry toff would say to some innocent constable, and not at all what such a toff would be likely to say, even if intending great rudeness... “ 

However, the High Court judge presiding over the libel case stated:- 

 For the reasons given, I’m satisfied, at least on the balance of probabilities, that Mr Mitchell did speak the words attributed to him, or so close to them as to amount to the same, the politically toxic word pleb.

on the grounds that the policeman was too thick to make it up.

Weighing up the competing claims, the judge said PC Rowland was "not the sort of man who would have had the wit, imagination or inclination to invent on the spur of the moment an account of what a senior politician had said to him in temper".

Of course some will always take the chance to poke at cyclists:- 

 In another interview on Today a former Tory MP, Michael Brown, said Mitchell would not have got into trouble if he had been using a ministerial car rather than a bicycle.

“The reason that cabinet ministers and junior ministers were given ministerial cars by Harold Macmillan was so that they didn’t get into this kind of mess,” he said. “My main criticism of Andrew Mitchell is that all this Cameroon bicycling nonsense is what got him into trouble. Ministerial cars are for ministers to be protected from this kind of rubbish.”

In countries with civilised urban transport politicians do get about on bicycles.

 

Danish politicians on ceremonial visit to the Queen of Denmark

The Beeb solemnly informed us that Plebgate, WhiteVangate and Taxigate * all demonstrate “an out of touch Westminster elite.“

Or demonstrate the media grabbing at trivia to make an easy story to get the comments boxes and social media boiling. All of those incidents could have been/should have been settled with a quick apology. All can be commented on from the top of the stupidest head. At a time with two forms of destructive nationalism on the up in Britain and parties competing to out-anti-immigrant each other, we could do with less of this nonsense.

 *(Conspiracy theory – all involving transport.... must join up somewhere..)

Unite on the streets

On our streets taxi, bus and lorry drivers and cyclists have an uncomfortable  relationship. In Edinburgh a piece of dangerously inept road design united taxi drivers and cyclists in protest, and this union of shared interest was presented as a kind of Ribbentrop pact.  

Bella Bathurst's The Bicycle Book had one chapter where cabbies spilled their dislike of cyclists. - for getting in the way, bending their wing mirrors and scratching their doors as they do that cyclist's slither along the roofless tunnel that motorised vehicles create.

In London "around 50% of all cyclist deaths involve lorries, which comprise only about 5% of traffic, with a high proportion happening when left-turning trucks crush cyclists." Construction lorries are the main culprit.

The London Cycle Campaign has an arm that attempts to improve co-existence between lorries and cyclists.  One simple method is for cyclists and lorry drivers to change seats. Cyclists sit in  the cab and note the restricted view of a lorry driver. A friend of mine. a London cycling commuter, tried this, and said it was an eye-opener, seeing where the blind spots are.  London councils offer their drivers a day on a bicycle to widen their understanding of what a road is like for a cyclist.

This kind of thing is obviously better than professional drivers' and cyclists' relationship being that of giving each other the finger and swearing.

The London Cycle Campaign also gives advice on how cyclists should drive near lorries.  Their advice confirmed my instincts - when I see one of those big bastards I don't go near them.  I give them all the road in the world to get away from my space.  

 

At the moment street design in the United Kingdom means cyclists and motorised vehicles having to share busy, fast streets.  Cyclists and the professional drivers are together in wanting to be apart. There have been six deaths of cyclists in London in a fortnight, about which Unite put out a statement:-

Unite, Britain’s biggest union, which represents London’s bus and taxi drivers, is calling on Boris Johnson to take urgent action to stop the tragic loss of life on the streets of the capital.

The union is urging the Mayor to invest, as a matter of urgency, in safe and effective cycle routes, separated from other road users to reduce the practice of cyclists using the capital’s congested bus lanes.

The number of cyclists on London’s streets has trebled in recent years, but the Mayor’s infrastructure strategy and spending policy is nowhere near enough to cope with the influx and is wholly inadequate.

.....

“Our bus driver members have been deeply affected by the tragic loss of life on our roads, and recognise the vulnerability of cyclists vying for space on London’s increasingly busy roads.

"Boris Johnson’s spending policy for cyclists is lagging behind reality. The Mayor and his cycling commissioner Andrew Gilligan have a lot to answer for, following their deeply inappropriate and insensitive comments. Their blasé remarks show utter contempt for the health and safety of all road users.

Jim Kelly, Unite taxi representative, said: “Unite’s bus and taxi driver members report that in many places the Mayor’s blue Cycle Super Highways are not fit for purpose – a bit of blue paint is simply not enough to keep cyclists safe.

“Urgent action is needed to develop a safe cycling network that takes cyclists away from the capital’s busiest and most congested thoroughfares. An example of good practice can be found in Cable Street East London, where cyclists have a route segregated from traffic - a safe alternative to the busy Commercial Road.”

Meanwhile the London Cycling Campaign is "calling on the Mayor to redesign every major junction in Greater London to make cycling a safe, comfortable and convenient experience for everyone, and is demanding he take immediate action to address Cycle Superhighway 2 from Aldgate to Bow. "

 More than a 1,000 cyclists blocked traffic as they lay in the road outside the Transport for London (TfL) headquarters tonight to protest recent road deaths.

Here's the vision of an infrastructure presented by Boris Johnson and Andrew Gilligan, his cycling commissioner:-

The present blue painted lines are presumably supposed to be a step towards that urban paradise, but they contain shocking sections at present.  Follow this link to a video which shows how bad a place it is at the moment, and looking at it, with the segregated paths being in short chunks that disappear at junctions, I wouldn't cycle that for £1000.

Another video shows how the Dutch, who are the cycling gods, manage their infrastructure. There are different light phases for cyclists. There are rights on uncontrolled crossings for pedestrians and cycles, and clear sightlines for lorries. What makes me really envious are the safe busy roundabouts, which are my greatest fear. Oh, note that the red-light jumper is a British lorry!(2:29).

 

These aren't mock ups. They're pictures of actual people using safe infrastructure in actual cities

More on From One Second to the Next

 Werner Herzog's film Aguirre: The Wrath of God is one of my favourite films. There are wonderful scenes, like the conquistadores climbing down the Andes at the beginning and the last scenes of the raft half-sinking down the Amazon carrying an insane Klaus Kinski and little monkeys that squeak and clamber like primate rats.  It's a rich and haunting film, and poetic in that it suggests more than it states.

Now he's made a documentary, From One Second to the Next, that shows the victims of accidents cause by drivers texting. An athletic boy is crippled, a go-getting woman  is brain damaged, an Amish family and a couple of engineers have been killed. Their families are stricken and have the dignity of those who are bearing pain and sorrow. "I can't tell him to go play in the yard," says the mother of the once athletic boy, and it's heart-breaking.

Two of the texting drivers appear, and they are dignified as well, dragging around a burden of remorse.

From One Second to the Next has been designed as an educational film to be taken around schools and shown by government agencies. It was sponsored by AT&T.

Herzog says:-  "What AT&T proposed immediately clicked and connected inside of me. There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving — or texting at all — but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us."

I don't know what he means by that - perhaps that this is the Age of Distraction in both senses of the word (constant entertainment, not paying attention) but what he has made is an educational film of beauty and power, unlike the pedestrian educational films from my school days.

I have some memories of films about how tractors can roll over and kill you (I went to a country school), how to equip yourself for tramping in the bush and how to avoid venereal disease. They were probably put together by a couple of underlings in the Department of Education rather than a highly acclaimed director.  Occasionally there would be mini-dramas eg one called something like Seven Candles about a father who manages to avoid all possible car accidents to get to his daughter's birthday until the last scene when he steps out from behind a parked van. 

I've been watching Top of the Lake and I bet that Jane Campion could probably knock out a powerful film on bush safety, since she does convey the chilly hostility of New Zealand wilderness.  Other directors come to mind - Woody Allen on safe sex perhaps?  Danny Boyle's nerve-twisting 127 Hours raises painful awareness of what could happen if you don't follow a cardinal rule of hiking or mountaineering - tell someone where you're going.

I'd like to think that a director of Herzog's talent will make the message stick that texting when driving is dangerously stupid - even Jeremy Clarkson wouldn't argue with that.  However drivers do turn their eyes to other things than what's ahead when hurling their chunks of metal down the roads.  This is the Age of Distraction after all.

From a cycling forum the other day

“4 drivers texting/reading maps on their phones. I only cycled past about 40 cars so that was a startling 10% of all drivers I saw on my 10 minute commute this morning.”

Pedal on Parliament - Sunday 19th May 2013 3pm

I took part in the Pedal on Parliament last year. It was a heartening sight, with thousands of cyclist meeting in the Meadows and then cycling down the Royal Mile to a rally in front of Holyrood Parliament.  Just for once, we owned Edinburgh's narrow, dangerous streets.

Pedal on Parliament is happening again, on Sunday 19th May.  Assemble at the Meadows to take part in the ride, which kicks off at 3pm.

What we want

1. Proper funding for cycling.
2. Design cycling into Scotland’s roads.
3. Slower speeds where people live, work and play
4. Integrate cycling into local transport strategies
5. Improved road traffic law and enforcement
6. Reduce the risk of HGVs to cyclists and pedestrians
7. A strategic and joined-up programme of road user training
8. Improved statistics supporting decision-making and policy

Manifesto

Making Scotland a cycle-friendly nation

The great city is not the one that has highways, but one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can go safely everywhere. – Enrique Peñalosa

Cycling should be the obvious solution to many of Scotland’s ills. It is cheap, healthy, democratic and convivial, benefits local economies and makes the streets a safer place for all. Cyclist benefit themselves – physiologically their bodies are, on average, many years ‘younger’ than non-cyclists’, and they suffer less from the ‘western’ diseases that beset Scotland so – and  they benefit others, cutting congestion and improving air quality. And yet bikes barely seem to be taken seriously as a mode of transport while the majority of Scots don’t cycle, simply because they feel it is too risky. Although statistically the benefits of cycling vastly outweigh the risks, poor design and maintenance of roads and cycle routes, dangerous driving, and lack of enforcement mean those risks remain unacceptably high. Making Scotland safe for cycling and walking, and – more importantly – making it feel safe, could transform our cities and villages and the lives of the people who live in them.

The Scottish government has already made a start. It led the world in signing up to a low-carbon future, part of which will include much higher levels of cycling. The Cycling Action Plan for Scotland (CAPS) set the target of having 10% of all journeys in Scotland made by bike by 2020. Whilst many of the individual points in CAPS are welcome, CAPS does not add up to a coherent, researched and costed path to reach the 2020 target – and nor has it received anything like the necessary funding.  Furthermore, even the existing funding levels are under threat. The history of UK cycling policy is full of strategies which have been quietly shelved when it becomes clear that their targets are not going to be met. We hope the Scottish government will not join Westminster in this hall of shame.

We call on all Scotland’s politicians, of all parties, to sign up to the following eight point manifesto in order to make cycling a realistic choice for everyone, from eight to eighty – and show the rest of the UK that cycling doesn’t just belong on continental Europe, but in the country where it all began:

1. Proper funding for cycling, with a high and rising share of the transport budget committed to cycling nationally, and locally.

If cycling is to reach 10% of all trips then there needs be serious investment. We ask the Scottish government to to commit a minimum of 5% of its transport budget – revenue and capital – to cycling within an overall commitment of 10% of the transport budget to active travel. Further, local authorities should also commit a share of their transport revenue and capital budgets to cycling at least in proportion with the percentage of people cycling to work or school in their area until in total, spending on cycling from all sources reaches a target of £25 per head per year.

To put this into perspective, 5% of the £2bn annual Scottish transport budget equates roughly to £100m, or £20 per head, which is comparable to the £1.32bn over 11 years that the Low Carbon Scotland report proposed spending on active travel (including walking). At the moment in Scotland actual spending is nearer £2-£3 per head. In contrast, in 2010, the Netherlands spent €30 per head (around £25) on installing and upgrading its cycling infrastructure which is already streets ahead of anything found here. Cycling England’s 2005-2011 Cycling City and Towns project invested around £10 per head and achieved significant growth in everyday cycle use, saving around £2.5 for every £1 spent, principally in reduced congestion. Other studies have shown that money invested on cycling and walking networks can pay back up to nineteen times the amount spent, a better rate of return than any other transport investment. If cycling levels rise to 13%, the benefit to Scotland would be between £1-2bn.

2. Design cycling into all of Scotland’s roads and junctions, with improved and strengthened national design guidelines in line with best practice internationally.

Improved provision for cycling must include a commitment to transforming Scotland’s roads and junctions. The existing design guidelines, Cycling by Design, should be revised in line with best practice internationally – particularly drawing on the experience of the Netherlands where 25% of trips are by bike. These standards should be incorporated into the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges and local authority road design guidance and should form minimum national standards for any new road or any road being substantially maintained or upgraded, whether local or trunk road. In addition, the Scottish Government should investigate whether it is possible for these standards to be made binding on roads authorities. Each local authority should commit to creating a dense network of direct and dedicated cycling routes with separation from traffic where needed, particularly on busy roads. Cycling infrastructure should be suitable for cyclists of all kinds, whether fast commuters or children on their way to school. Importantly, it should not bring cyclists into conflict with either pedestrians or heavy traffic. Such designs don’t just benefit cyclists, they benefit everyone who uses the roads.

3. Safer speeds where people live, work and play.
There are significant road safety benefits to a 20 mph speed limit. In residential areas, the presumption should be that roads authorities should apply 20mph speed limits as the norm in these areas. Lower speed limits should also be considered for unclassified rural roads where all road traffic faces a completely unacceptable risk of accident.

4. Build increased cycling into local transport strategies.
Local councils are best placed to know how cycling and active travel can be improved in its own area. Each local authority should be required produce its own local cycling action plan with clear targets to increase cycling levels in line with the national target of 10%, using the existing cycling levels as a guideline. Funding to support this should be ring-fenced and councils required to report against their progress every year. As well as working towards a coherent joined up network (see point 2), plans should include integration with public transport, including buses and trains, making cycling a seamless and practical part of even longer journeys. Local authorities should take cyclists into account when drawing up their maintenance plans, with a duty to give equal consideration to off-road tracks and infrastructure when planning gritting, road cleaning and repairs. Resurfacing roads and fixing potholes should take cyclists’ needs into consideration as well as motorists.

5. Improved road traffic law and enforcement.
While acknowledging that road traffic law is effectively reserved to the UK Government, traffic law must do more to protect the most vulnerable road users such as cyclists, pedestrians, children and older people. The CAPS already includes a commitment to investigate the feasibility of introducing ‘strict liability’ – we would reiterate that this must not be sidelined. Restrictions on parking in bike lanes and on pavements should be strictly enforced and, given a lack of police action on these issues, those local authorities that have not requested decriminalisation of parking enforcement should be encouraged to do so. Where 20mph zones have been brought in they should be properly policed and sentencing must be appropriate when drivers cause harm.

6. A comprehensive package to eliminate the risk of HGVs to cyclists and pedestrians.
This is a pressing problem. Heavy lorries are associated with a disproportionately high risk of death or very serious injury to cyclists and pedestrians. For example, despite being just 6% of road traffic, lorries were involved in around 20% of all cyclists’ fatalities in London. CAPS already has targets for reducing cycling casualties but the onus must not just be on the cyclists to keep themselves safe. The Scottish government should engage with the UK Department of Transport with a view to developing a comprehensive package of measures to reduce the risk to cyclists and pedestrians, based on up to date evidence of what works. These might include better training, mirrors, sensors and warnings, or limitations on movements of large freight vehicles during the morning and evening peaks. Equally they might include complete redesign of junctions to remove conflict between bikes and lorries.

7. A strategic and properly funded programme of road user training.
Much is made of developing training for cyclists in the CAPS yet Bikeability is not fully funded, and Cycling Scotland is dependent on volunteers to carry out vital training in schools. But training should not be confined to children – nor even just to cyclists. All Scottish residents should have access to affordable cycle training, whether children, adult returning cyclists, and those in later life. Further, HGV drivers, bus drivers and other professional drivers should be required to take an on-bike qualification (or a theoretical module if physically unable to cycle) as part of their licensing requirement and be made aware of the needs of both pedestrians and cyclists, and the Scottish government should press the UK government to introduce these measures .

8. Solid research and statistics on cycling.
We can only improve decision-making and policy development with solid research. The information that records how many people are cycling is very poor at the national level and inconsistent at the local level. This makes it difficult to monitor what is happening and which interventions have greatest impact. At a minimum counts should be carried out twice a year using standardised protocols for data collection and handling, taking into account cyclists using off-road facilities as well as those on the public highway. Where possible electronic counters with public displays should be used, as in Copenhagen and other cities, which count the number of cyclists passing through certain areas as these can provide both feedback and encouragement. These would become a talking point and a public reminder to cyclists that they are part of a growing band taking control of their health – and their freedom.

There is all to play for and so little to lose. Proper investment in cycling is not a zero-sum game. It will bring so much more than the expenditure put in, benefits which will gradually be reflected in a changing, healthier population. We all know our natural resources are not infinite and we would irresponsible not to think of ways of making them last, but cycling is hardly a hair-shirt option. Rather it is a joyous way to get about – but one that has become confined to a hardy few because of the conditions on our roads. From Kirkpatrick MacMillan onwards, Scotland has a long history of popular cycling which has been all but forgotten. We believe these times can come again and Scotland can once more be a beacon for the world.

Full article with footnotes here.