London. 42 years behind and counting. The revolution still hasn't started.

Two years have now passed since London's cycling "czar", Andrew Gilligan, told the world that his city was 40 years behind Amsterdam.

London's mayor, Boris Johnson, has now been in power for more time than it took to transform the entirety of the Netherlands for cycling, with no substantial progress occurring under his time in office. London's record on achieving press coverage is phenomenal. There has been a lot of noise made in London about cycling. Unfortunately, actual building of well-designed infrastructure is another thing altogether.

According to London's plans from two years ago, the peak year of expenditure is 2015. Yes, this is it. What does not get done in 2015 has less chance of being done later. This is the year when expenditure on cycling reaches its peak of £18 per person per year. That's about 2/3 of the usual Dutch level of expenditure. For the other years of the plan the expenditure level will be less than £10 per person per year, under 1/3 of the Dutch level. As I pointed out two years ago, the plans simply were not ambitious enough. London can never 'catch up' with the Netherlands by spending only a third as much for a limited period of time. Perhaps this is why the target in London is for a mere 5% of journeys to be made by bike.

A selection of proposals from last year
Sadly, proposals for new infrastructure in London remain inadequate. Here are a selection of those which I've seen over the last year.

Dangerous central cycle-lane leading into advanced stop boxes (including one in the fourth lane over). That's not cycling infrastructure, it's yet more paint.

How many lanes and places to cross ? Why ? This proposal was praised in some quarters as at least including some segregation of modes. What it actually does is demonstrate that the designers don't understand that bicycles are not the same as cars. Cyclists don't need extra traffic lights which apply only to them, they should be able to avoid traffic lights in order to make cycling journeys faster.

"Gobsmackingly bonkers". More ASLs, on-road lanes and the addition of a cycle-path which for some reason goes straight through the middle of a roundabout. Safe roundabouts for cyclists look entirely different to this idea.

The "cycle waiting bay". A bizarre idea. How many people actually want special places where they can wait beside the road before continuing their journey rather than infrastructure which allows them to complete their journeys both safely and efficiently ?

'Advanced' lights, on-road lanes, multi-colour cycling facilties, dangerous multi-stage turns.

Update May 2015: One that I'd missed which is so awful in design that it really must be listed here. A redesign for Queen's Circus Battersea roundabout which is actually under construction. In some places this has been described as "Dutch", but it's very far from any real design for a Dutch roundabout. This junction is also far too busy for a Dutch roundabout design so in the Netherlands this junction would in fact use traffic lights instead. As we can see form the photo, traffic lights are actually installed, so this won't flow freely like a roundabout. I'm assured that the cycling infrastructure under construction is actually narrower than that shown in the picture.
Update July 2015: Watch a video which demonstrates this roundabout in action. Enormously long delays for cyclists, combined with red jumping by drivers which puts cyclists in danger even after they've waited for a green light.

The ludicrous ideas

London's "Skycycle". It doesn't actually
exist of course and hopefully never will
because this is neither convenient nor
affordable.

Of course we've not only seen lacklustre plans like those above, but also completely preposterous ideas. Cycle paths were proposed both in the sky and below ground, both of course far more expensive and less convenient places to put cycling infrastructure than where sensible people have been requesting it - ground level.

But why stop there ? The Bounceway offered the intriguing idea of trampolining to work, backed by a grant from Transport for London to a company which went bankrupt shortly afterwards.

There was also a proposal for a bridge full of trees over the Thames which it may or may not be possible to cycle over. Update 2018: Note that this proposal, which consisted of almost nothing when I wrote the previous sentence, turned into the "Garden Bridge" project, which was cancelled without anything being built but through a fantastic degree of mismanagement still consumed 46 million pounds.

Discussing these things has wasted many hours of many peoples' time, detracting from focus on what the city should really be doing. It all demonstrates that London is still missing the big picture.

What London should really be doing
The lacklustre but serious proposals demonstrate that those working on road designs in London simply do not understand how to create good quality cycling infrastructure. The crazy ideas demonstrate something else: that those in charge don't know what to ask for.

What London needs to do now is exactly what the city has needed to do for the last 42 years:

Quietly get on with building a high quality grid of cycling routes to every destination and which absolutely everyone can use

Cycling doesn't need buzzwords. press releases, mocked up pictures which show inadequate plans or exaggerated claims. Cycling in London doesn't need people on the other side of the planet to be told about things that you might get around to doing in the future. Stop putting so much effort into trying to get good press and far too little into achieving results.

Length of headlines is far less important than length of cycle-path. The actual need of cyclists to be able to ride from wherever they live to wherever they need to go should not take a very poor second place to appearing to do the right thing to the world's press.

London has started to use the language of a grid, though they've misunderstood the intention. What is required is a very fine grid. To try again to make it clear, I'll explain how it is from my home in the Netherlands. I have to ride for just 30 seconds along 30 km/h residential streets with no through traffic (we live in a cul-de-sac - a design of street which naturally reduces through traffic) to reach either of two very high quality cycle-paths (this one and this one) which between them provide me with an efficient and safe route to every possible destination in the whole country. This is nothing special - it's normality in the Netherlands. What's more, the cycle-paths making up the majority of the grid are built to an extraordinarily high standard and maintaining the integrity of even small parts of the grid can require some surprisingly large works. This is what leads to the very high degree of subjective safety required to make cycling attractive to everyone.

Click here for details. We'd be very happy to
show TfL people what is actually required
in order to help to prevent them from making
further mistakes

Another concept which appears to have been misunderstood on its journey across the North Sea is that of unravelling of cycling routes from driving routes. London's "Quietways" are implied to mean something similar, but the emphasis is completely wrong. Rather than cyclists having direct main routes, they are given back streets. What's more, London's "Quietways" cannot even be expected to be quiet. This simply isn't good enough to effect mass cycling.

Where cycle-paths cannot be fitted along narrow streets, unravelling removes motor traffic so that even the youngest of cyclists can get right to their destinations in the Netherlands.

We'd like to help London to do the right thing, but this is only possible if the city will let us help.

Where the money goes
2015 is to be the peak year for investment in cycling in London. However this doesn't mean that the figure of "£18 per head" allocated only for this year can be spent on new infrastructure projects in the city. It can't be spent in that way because their are already many other things for which the funds have been pre-allocated. One of the largest sinks for money is the public bike hire scheme in London.

I visited London just over a year ago
Cyclists still look like this and there
are good reasons why that is so.

London is building public fountains rather than providing running water to every home. One of those "fountains" is the bike share system. I've been pointing out why bike share systems are not really a solution for mass cycling since 2009.

Five years ago we discovered that London's hire bikes had already cost £23000 per bike, making them the most expensive bikes in the world. Operating costs for the system remain very high at around £24 M per year. This figure is around 1/6th of the total funding available for the peak year of 2015 and more than 1/3rd of that for other years, greatly reducing how much money is left over to spend on infrastructure which could enable everyone to cycle.

Londoners owned more than a million bikes before the bike hire scheme started. A lack of bicycles was never the reason and is still not the reason why so few journeys are made by bicycle in London. The problem was and remains a lack of truly safe places to ride a bike.

Does London have unique journeys ?

Londoners use their cars for almost
 exactly the same purposes as the Dutch
use their bicycles

People often imagine that their own cities have problems which don't exist in the Netherlands and that this makes it more difficult to accommodate cycling. That really does not apply to London. Londoners makes the same journeys as Dutch people, both by length of journey and for purpose. However rather than making these journeys by bicycle, Londoners use other means including the car.

Attractive, safe, go-everywhere cycling
infrastructure is missing from London

Travelling by bicycle is not attractive in London now because of the conditions which people face on the streets of the city scare the masses away. We already know how to attract everyone to cycling.

There's a very good working example of what truly works a few kilometres to the East of London and I'm very happy to demonstrate it to anyone who is interested.

It's important to stop over-selling what London has done
Unfortunately, the over-selling of London doesn't only affect the UK. Hype from London spreads around the world. This leads to people in such places as Tokyo and Belgium seeing London as an inspiration - and therefore looking most firmly in the wrong direction rather than seeking to emulate best practice.

New funding announcement
Some readers may be aware that the British government announced extra funding for cycling two days ago. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, the extra funding announced is far too low a figure to make a real difference. In order to match the Dutch level of expenditure, the UK needs to spend more than £2 Billion pounds per year on cycling, but all that has been promised is £114 milion spread across four years and only available to be spent in some areas of the country.

How the DfT illustrates their funding
claim. It's a long way from what Dutch
children look like when they cycle.

The latest announcement follows a familiar pattern by using big and impressive sounding numbers in a way that may well confuse readers so that they think that cycling is being funded well. In reality even the largest number in the announcement ("This brought the total investment in cycling by this government to £588 million") reveals a paucity of ambition. That £588 Million spread across the five year life of the present government leaves us with British government funding for cycling which is still at a rate which is only around 1/16th of that required to match Dutch levels of expenditure. This level of funding does not represent an improvement over the early 1990s when cycle funding already hovered around one pound per person per year.

Read more about the Deputy Prime
Minister's cycling revolution.

The Deputy Prime Minister claims that Britain is "in the midst of a cycling revolution". This is the sort of language which we have heard many times before, and also claims that "this money can help Britain become a cycling nation to rival the likes of Denmark and the Netherlands". It's simply not possible for Britain to begin to rival countries which are decades ahead in cycling until the government takes cycling seriously. Far from proving that the government has begun to do that, this announcement actually proves that cycling is still not being taken seriously in the UK so we should expect a continuation of cycling at a rate of around 1-2% of journeys.

You can't catch up by running slower than the people who are ahead of you. The UK's cycling decline took decades of under-investment and to make cycling normal once again requires decades of a high level of investment.

Britain last week
I was in Britain last week to visit family. While there, Sustrans called on people to celebrate 20 years of the National Cycle Network so I dutifully borrowed a bike to ride along roads which are far busier than they should be in such a small town in order to take photos.

NCN 33 wiggle onto a muddy beach.
If the tide is in, what then ?, swim ?
We're supposed to #celebrate20 this ?

What passes for the National Cycle Network in this part of the UK consists of several signs threatening a £500 fine to anyone who dared to ride on a wide pavement to avoid the traffic, followed by a very small and out of the way sign telling people to ride on the pavement for a short distance, and then an inconvenient wiggle down onto a beach which has mud so sticky that one of the world's very few hovercraft rescue services was established in the area to pull people out of it.

Celebrate what, precisely ? This is not the efficient go-everywhere cycling infrastructure required to get the masses to see cycling as convenient.

I also visited a new housing development which was repeating the same mistakes as other new developments in the UK. i.e.it was designed only for cars, but with the twist of providing so little space for cars that there's nowhere to park them but over the pavements. In order to convince people to use alternatives to driving, the alternative must be realistic. Carrots work better than sticks.

The same mistakes are being repeated time and time again in the UK.

Update March 22 2015
London has "quietly" abandoned the target of a 5% modal share for cycling by 2026, leaving no real target for growth at all. It's perhaps worth reflecting on what I wrote about this target two years ago:

'setting a target of only around 5% of journeys by bike is not very ambitious at all. Nowhere in the Netherlands has such a low modal share and Britain has been promised more than this before. The lack of a serious target shows that this is not a real attempt to "catch up".'

Now that even that lacklustre target has been abandoned, what now for London ?

The video below shows current cycling conditions in London. For three seconds starting at 1:06 you can actually see a brand new cycle-lane which was opened just a few days ago. Yes, it lasts just three seconds on the video. A 5% cycling modal share will remain beyond London until there are real changes to the infrastructure. No quantity of press releases and no amount of training will ever cause the population as a whole to cycle on streets which look like this:



Update July 2015
Andrew Gilligan has used the spectre of "fending off" myself and other "people like that" as an excuse not to be available to the public on social media, particularly through Twitter.

Readers may remember that I've actually offered to help London on many occasions. Invitations were first sent in 2005 before our first study tour in 2006. They were sent again, to Boris Johnson, in 2008. Since that time I've offered study tours free of charge to Boris Johnson on two occasions: Once in 2011 and then again in 2013. Note that only the second offer dates to the first offer dates back to well before Andrew Gilligan started work in London. The second free invitation was extended to him as well as to his boss, Boris Johnson.

I don't offer to work for free for no reason. I did so because I genuinely wanted to help and I did not want the cost of the tour to be in any way a reason for London not to send representatives.

We have still had no official contact with either Andrew Gilligan or Boris Johnson. Not even a proper acknowledgment of our invitation having been received. It is disappointing that Andrew prefers to try to discredit me by slighting me as he did at the Hackney Cycling Conference rather than engage with me and my genuine attempt to help London's authorities to improve conditions for the people who live in the city.

As I pointed out over a year ago, London's (and the UK in general's) lack of interest in tackling cycling is killing people. People die every day, either from their lack of exercise due to driving or from the danger on the roads due to traffic. It's an ongoing emergency situation.

My postal vote for the UK to remain in the EU was
posted a few days ago - with a bicycle stamp upon it ;-)
Sadly, this was sent to me so late that it was probably not
counted, so I could not help the country avoid catastrophe.

Update June 2016
Boris Johnson is no longer the mayor of London. He is now leading a campaign for the UK to leave the EU and he has ambitions to become the prime minister of the UK. Please remember that this is the same BJ who was "fired from The Times in 1988 for fabricating a quotation" and who made his name by taking an extreme euro-skeptic position, inventing many of the ridiculous myths about the EU which have since been comprehensively busted.

Note: Most of the invitations which I've sent to London were sent before Andrew Gilligan started working at the city in 2013 and before I joined Twitter in 2011. The idea that Andrew Gilligan should particularly be concerned that I'd contact him through Twitter is patently absurd.

TfL's terrible "two stage right turn" - which is actually approved of by LCC

This blog post is primarily about a particularly poor suggested design for London. Click here for a particularly good design for turning across traffic, here for an example of a dangerous design,  here for a selection of good junction designs.

Yesterday evening, this week's Study Tour group, a mix of campaigners and planners from Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA, ate their evening meal with us at a nice restaurant in Groningen which happens to overlook the most dangerous junction in the whole of The Netherlands.

Why the shocked expression ? Read on

The food was great, the company was excellent, and while we watched how the traffic, especially bikes, crossed the most dangerous junction in the whole of The Netherlands, we saw several almost incidents which were enough to demonstrate why this junction is a problem. That's why we take people there. However, the shocked expression which Charlie Holland photographed on my face wasn't the result of what was going on in Groningen yesterday evening, it was the result of watching the latest video from Transport For London showing their plans for Stratford High Street, part of the extension of "Cycling Superhighway 2":

Is this the world's first cycle junction design to accommodate the needs of those people who are not "ambiturners" ? This junction design not only includes the appalling right turn design but also on-road cycle-lanes and advanced stop lines. These are also examples of old-fashioned and dangerous provision. Astonishingly, people actually get paid for this standard of work. If you're a Londoner it comes out of your taxes.

I've criticized two stage turns before because even if done well, they're hardly optimal to encourage cycling. Not only do they keep cyclists on the road, but they extend the amount of time that a cyclist spends in the junction area. Quite apart from any physical danger, this is certainly not good for subjective safety. A two stage turn is an admission of not knowing how to deal with cyclists. It results in delays, it's difficult with a cargo bike, when carrying children or towing a trailer to spin on the spot and enter the correct position to make the turn. If you're an older person or have a disability then the problems will be even greater. This design is particularly illogical, quite the reverse of the self-explaining streets which the Dutch strive for. It will not be easy for people, especially children, to understand so it will be used in ways the designer did not intend.

Some ASLs still exist in NL, but they're
amongst the things you should not copy
despite being "Dutch"

I've also criticized Advanced Stop Lines (bike boxes) before because these also cause conflict. A cyclist trying to position themselves correctly to make a right turn in such a box is required to ride across other lanes of traffic. The TfL designer actually expects this to happen as they've planned in an ASL which is in the middle of the road for right turns. This would not be required if they had designed the junction properly in the first place so that there was no advantage to cyclists from riding in front of buses.

"Being aware of each other" is not infrastructure, it's an accident waiting to happen. Crashes occur when people are not paying attention and it is the function of correctly designed infrastructure to be forgiving of mistakes, not to rely on people behaving perfectly in order to be safe.

Questions
Questions for the designer: Who is the target audience for this ? Who is it that requested their journeys be made longer and less convenient and who wanted to spend more of their time when cycling around junctions with motor vehicles ?

It won't necessarily be safe, but I expect
anyone running late for an appointment
will be tempted by the convenience of
the red line over the longer orange line

Do you really expect that someone will ride that extra distance to position themselves in your secondary waiting area if they're running late ? No-one should have to choose between "safe" and "convenient". This design forces people to have to make a "devil's bargain" when good infrastructure doesn't force that choice to be made.

Would you let a five year old ride across this junction ? Would you even let a teenager ride unaccompanied here ? If not, why not ? Is it not easy enough to understand ? Can errors easily be made ? These are admissions that the junction is not sustainably safe. Accidents will happen and injuries and deaths are likely to result from the building of infrastructure like this.

It's not just a sketch
According to the description on TfL's youtube channel, this is going to be reality in London as of October 2013. It is to be part of London's "superhighway" network.

Frankly, it's amazing that someone can do work of this quality, that they can pass it to their boss, it gets approval to be built, people can make promotional videos of it and the promotion department can let people know about it, and all of the people involved should have been paid for their efforts without anyone noticing how dreadful it is.

Transport For London, is this really the best you can do ? Do you honestly imagine that this will enable you to catch up with The Netherlands ?

What should they have done ?
The most advanced treatment of a traffic light junction in the Netherlands now is the Simultaneous Green junction. These junctions remove all conflict in both space and time. No-one has to find their way to the front of a queue of motor vehicles. No-one has to wait twice to make one turn. Everyone gets to take the most direct route across the junction, no matter what their skill level and without any risk of being run over. Children can ride safely across because it is obvious how to ride safely across such a junction. It's even possible to incorporate right turn on red for cyclists only and to make the phases of the lights such that cyclists' average delays are half that of motorists. There is a lot of inbuilt flexibility in Simultaneous Green junctions.

Yesterday, hours before dinner and hours before I'd seen TfL's video, our Study Tour group rode over this simultaneous green junction in Groningen. It's somewhat larger than the junction that TfL are planning for but extremely convenient and easy to use. Because no-one from TfL was in the Study Tour group, no-one from TfL saw this far superior and proven design of junction for themselves.

What's more, this design already exists and is proven at many different sizes of junction, from joining tiny roads (in Assen there's an example which has just one lane of motor traffic and a contra-flow cycle-lane) right up to junctions larger than that which TfL are dealing with, several lanes in each direction.

Simultaneous Green works for large
and small junctions. This road has
nothing but a short on-road cycle-lane
feeding into the junction and has on-
road car parking. It still works well.

In all cases, Simultaneous Green junctions are both convenient and safe for everyone to use. No-one is encouraged to choose a less safe route across the junction if they're in a hurry.

Before wasting money on doing the wrong thing, why didn't TfL send people over here to find out what real cycling infrastructure was, so that they were equipped to do a better job than they have ?

Not just London.
Southampton is also getting in on the act. More bad infrastructure design for a "superhighway", again making the mistake of separating "less confident" cyclists and giving them an inferior solution and again in a location which could very easily accommodate a Simultaneous Green junction which gave all cyclists both safety and convenience:

Complete with the three dangerous features of a bad bus stop design, on-road cycle-lanes and advanced stop-lines as well as supporting "less confident" cyclists in a different and less convenient way than those who are "more confident", this junction design which Southampton claims is "Dutch" is actually absolutely nothing like real Dutch infrastructure. Why do British councils take tax-payers' money and use it to pay people who do such shoddy work as this ? Again, this would be far superior, far safer and more convenient for cyclists and also far more representative of real Dutch infrastructure if it had been designed as a simultaneous green junction.

Southampton, the design which you are considering is not "Dutch". You are being sold a copy of a type of junction which kills cyclists in Denmark. Please consider sending your planners on a Study Tour to find out about better solutions than this. Send them to find out what really is built in The Netherlands, how and why it works, so that you can apply the same principles in your city.

Click here to book a study tour

We demonstrate real Dutch cycling infrastructure over three days, showing some of the very best examples as well as demonstrating why the less good infrastructure should not be emulated.

Let us help you to avoid the costly mistake of building infrastructure which causes the conflict, danger and inconvenience which you have designed into the Itchen Bridge junction.

Saturday 31st August update
I've just found out that London Cycling Campaign actually approve of the ridiculous design shown at the top of this page for Stratford High Road. In fact, they're taking credit for it.  This is one of two things they describe as "solutions proposed by our Love London, Go Dutch campaign" (note that in response to this criticism they changed their web page at this link to say that it's a "poor implementation", but the headline remains as positive as before and comments under the blog post still refer to their enthusiasm).

Londoners, you've got to seriously think about this. You are represented by a campaigning organisation which sees "Love London, Go Dutch" as merely a slogan and nothing to do with actual Dutch infrastructure. Sadly, this has been obvious from the very start of their "campaign" when they admitted that one of their "Dutch" ideas was not Dutch at all and that they'd actually made up something they thought of as a "hybrid" of ideas from several countries but which actually doesn't appear in any other country.

I covered this a couple of weeks ago.
This one metre wide bus-stop bypass
with a post in it which is being praised
by LCC is not remotely the same as
"thousands in the Netherlands"

Another piece of infrastructure design which LCC are taking credit for is the inadequately designed bus stop bypass further along the same route (CS2). While LCC claim that there are "literally thousands of these in the Netherlands", that's simply not true. There are indeed thousands of bus stop bypasses over here, but they don't look like the one on CS2 - they're engineered to a far higher standard.

So long as the LCC continues to have such low aspirations for London, they will continue to be a part of the problem regarding cycling in the UK rather than being part of the solution.

I have invited people from London Cycling Campaign to join us on one of our Study Tours so that they can see and use real Dutch cycling infrastructure and have it explained to them. Thus far, they have declined the offer.

3rd October update
It's disappointing to see that instead of admitting that they've made an error, the LCC continue to try to spin this issue.

An LCC representative writes in a response to this blog post that "Well-designed two-stage right turns are approved of by both Dutch and Danish authorities and are common in Denmark". In fact, nothing remotely like the video from TfL above, which LCC says "could make cycling safer and more convenient" exists in The Netherlands. Remember that the campaigning position that LCC was forced by their membership to adopt was called "Love London, Go Dutch", not "Go Danish". This is not the first time that LCC has tried to confuse Dutch and Danish practice and their repetition of assertions like this one doesn't make them into facts.

It's not good enough for LCC to appropriate the language of change (as has happened with subjective safety and Go Dutch) but to carry on as usual, continuing to promote second-best solutions in London. While this continues, LCC remains part of the problem rather than part of the solution. These things need to turn into real policy and real change not just slogans.

I also note a comment made in the LCC response about not having been on our tours but going to "experts" instead. What LCC have actually turned down is the opportunity to take part in the only cycling study tours in this country run by people who speak English as a native language, who have lived and cycled in both the UK and the Netherlands and understand both countries and who are completely independent. We do not use the tours to sell the services of Dutch companies (note that employing a Dutch company is no guarantee that you'll get a Dutch quality of infrastructure). We demonstrate what does not work and why it does not work as well as showing those things which work very well. We don't give a false impression by visiting highlights but we aim to give an honest appraisal. We point out that not everything "Dutch" is worth copying, we don't rubber stamp anything and we won't be polite about bad ideas.

Frankly, I find the attitude of the LCC quite puzzling. If they were genuinely interested in furthering cycling, they would have investigated all possible sources of information, and that includes us. But they did not. Some people in LCC value our work enough to have asked us to do unpaid work for the organisation. They've also been happy to use our photographs and videos for free. But their interest extends only so far as what they can take. Apart from that, LCC has not made any contact at all.

We run our tours in order to try to educate people in organisations like LCC so that they can make better use of their funds and be more effective. Yes we do charge for the tours but this does not make us wealthy. In fact, we've barely done better than break even over the six years that we have operated study tours. That is as planned. This is not a self-serving exercise. Thankless as it often feels, this is something we invested a great deal of time and money into in order to try to make the world into a better place. When we've been able to afford to do so, we've even often offered free tours (i.e. at our cost) to people who thought would especially benefit.

If LCC staff are going to try to slight us, then it's only fair to point out that an independent source pointed out a couple of years ago that "70% of its budget goes on staff salaries and that the search for more funding is seen as an important LCC goal".

If anyone has their snout in the trough, I can assure readers that it's not us. We receive 0% of LCC's budget.

November 2013 update
In November, LCC returned to praising the CS2 extension of which this junction is a part, claiming it to be "a major success for LCC" before turning around and criticizing it a couple of days later after there had been fatalities on CS2. This is not good enough.

In case you're wondering, the most dangerous junction in the whole of the Netherlands is much less dangerous than several junctions in London. Nevertheless, this junction is an example of bad design and our study tours visit it because it is one of several places where we can demonstrate how conflicts are generated by bad design. TfL really would have benefited from this.

Oh London...

There's a new report out describing the impact of the London "Superhighways" and Bike Hire schemes on transport in the city. This report comes from the London Assembly Transport Committee. It can't get more official than that.

Over the last couple of years, both these schemes in London have been accompanied by the most amazing amount of hype. Having seen what was proposed I was skeptical from the beginning about both the superhighways and the bike share scheme.

These projects were so wrong-headed that they could never achieve what the promoters said they could achieve. Some people criticised me for saying this. However, if you read the report yourself you can see how well it has all worked.

A few highlights:

Bike Share

The original wild estimates of 10 uses per cycle-hire bike per day (which I pointed out long ago were rather unlikely) have of course not been met. Actually each bike is used on average about three times per day.

In planning, they assumed a "5% shift from car to bike", defined not as a proportion of the modal share currently by car (the scheme could never get anywhere near that) but with rather an odd usage whereby they were talking about 5% of the trips on the bikes being by people who would otherwise have used a car. This would have worked out as a mere 3000 trips per day converted from car to hire bike. However, given the much lower actual usage of the bikes and that the conversion ratio from drivers is actually "less than 1%", the number of trips being made by bike instead of by car is actually under 150 per day. Even 3000 is trivial in the context of a city of eight million people.

TFL originally predicted that the largest shift would be from walking (34%), the second largest from buses (32%) and with 20% of users using the bikes as alternative to the tube. The tube figures are born out in reality (though note this is with a much lower level of usage in total, so it's nowhere near the estimated not the same absolute number) but only 8% of users would otherwise take the bus and 7% would otherwise walk. 1% are the afore-mentioned car users. Almost half of all users would otherwise use their own bikes. 84% of registered users of the scheme own their own bike.

Now if we take that 20% of riders who would otherwise take the tube, how much of an effect of "relieving capacity" might this have ? 20% of users amounts to about 3500 trips per day displaced from the tube to the bikes. However, London Underground boasts of around 1.2 billion trips per year. Do the maths and you find that the Boris Bikes have displaced just 0.1% of tube traffic.

Thus far, the city seems unsure how much sponsorship money they will get from Barclays. I'm not the only one who doesn't know what's going on with this - even the committee describes the funding as "opaque". The corporate advertising is splashed all over everything already, but how much Barclays will actually pay is still unknown.

The bike hire scheme has previously been reported as already being "self funding". This never stood up to any inspection, but now we've been given actual numbers to look at. In reality it doesn't seem to come close to doing this.

Of course, the same can also be said of almost any large government infrastructure scheme, so that's not a criticism in itself. However, it's also unclear as to why they say that the bike hire should pay for itself ? This is never a consideration when building roads.

I'll leave it to others to criticise the slow roll-out of the scheme and problems which have occurred with registration and use. Some problems are to be expected, and whether this is better or worse than any other big project of the British government is open to debate.

Currently the plan is to eventually have 6000 bikes and 400 docking sites, compared with the scheme in Paris which currently has 24000 bikes and 1750 sites. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is quoted as saying that he wanted to overtake it, and that a London hire bike was a Rolls Royce compared to the Parisian "deux chevaux" [Citroen 2CV]. Those are words, not actions.

Superhighways

"60 per cent of respondents did not feel safer using the cycle superhighways and two-thirds did not feel they were respected by other road users." - hardly surprising given what they look like.

Users' comments:

• “The superhighways are not wide enough, stop abruptly at junctions and are extremely badly positioned on roads.”
• “I found the experience rather scary being sent from one side of the road to the other. I will not be doing it again.”
• “Just when you need them [cycle superhighways] - at major junctions, roundabouts and so on – they vanish. A novice cyclist, persuaded to venture out by the superhighways, is left high and dry just when they need most help.”

"The London Boroughs Cycling Officers’ Group has highlighted the importance of prioritising cyclists at junctions and getting rid of car parking over the cycle superhighways. Gina Harkell, the Vice-Chair of the Group, suggested it would be really nice if one of the cycle superhighways was “a truly dedicated route for cyclists such as those found in Holland, Germany and Denmark.”"

"Sustrans has highlighted that the greatest barrier to Londoners cycling, or cycling
more, is fear of traffic yet the cycle superhighways generally follow busy arterial roads and provide no or minimal segregation from traffic."

"All 12 cycle superhighways will be installed, as planned, by 2015." - does it really have to take this long ?

One user said: “I cycle to work along the Barclays cycle superhighway to work in the Barclays building in Canary Wharf where there is not enough cycle parking! Oh, the irony.”

Conclusion
The conclusion of their report is overall quite remarkably positive given what they've reported on.

Everyone would of course like to see cycling increase in London and around the rest of the UK, but even with the positive spin they conclude, as I do, that not nearly enough is being done to encourage people who don't cycle to want to cycle.

To achieve the target now set by the Mayor, the bike hire scheme needs to be used for 40000 trips per day and the superhighways need to be used for 120000 trips per day. London is a city of 8 million people. At a rate of 2.5 trips per day (this is fairly average worldwide) that means that Londoners currently make around 20 million trips per day. If the targets are met, and 160000 trips per day are converted into bike trips by the new schemes then they will have succeeded in a less than 1% modal share shift. However, that's not actually on the cards at all. Currently, only a fifth of hire bike users didn't already cycle in London. That makes for around extra 3000 trips per day. The survey also shows that the "superhighways" currently are used by 5000 people per day, of which only 1% are new cyclists. That's 50 people. If we generously assume they do all of their 2.5 trips per day, every day, by bike they add just 125 trips. Take these numbers and divide them into London's total number of trips by all modes and you find that the massive expenditure on hire bikes and superhighways has resulted in a modal shift of just 0.01%.

London needs a lot more than that.

The problem remains what it always was. A lack of subjective safety. If you want Dutch levels of cycling in London, you need people to feel as happy cycling in London as they do in the Netherlands. These schemes have come nowhere near providing this.

So far, London's initiatives have proven to be merely a very expensive demonstration showing what not to do if you want mass cycling.

Update the next day
There's some more analysis of numbers here

And to think that it's not that long ago that Dutch newspapers were getting worried that the Netherlands would lose its number one spot for cycling due to initiatives like this. They also believed the hype, that somehow this country would be overtaken. Thanks to Freewheeler for putting me on to this.

More on London's "Superhighways"

After showing perhaps the most dangerous cycle crossing in the UK a few days ago, now here's a chance (courtesy of gaz545) to see one of London's newest and most impressive pieces of cycling infrastructure: "Cycle Superhighway" number 7 - or should I say "Barclays Cycle Superhighway 7" as these things now have a corporate sponsor.

Just as before when I've covered London's "superhighways", there is very much to criticise. Here's a start, annotated with the time on the video:

• 0:00 The "superhighway" is not continuous. At the start of the video there is nothing to see.
• 0:02 At the road junction the white lines are missing, making it less obvious that drivers should not cut across cyclists in order to turn left.
• 0:13 The cycle lane was narrow enough already, but becomes narrower - especially if you were looking at the line.
• 0:15 The cycle lane is narrow, but also note the pavement (sidewalk) width
• 0:23 Detritus in the cycle lane.
• 0:24 The red line from the left crosses the "superhighway" and takes the place of the white line. I lived in the UK for many years, but I don't know the significance of this. Does it mean cars can park on this part of the "superhighway."
• 0:37 Road works overflowing into the "superhighway," leaving even less space for the cyclist
• 0:39 Arrows on the "superhighway" directing someone to the right. Presumably not cyclists...
• 0:40 Oh, it's become a "bus lane". Over here we don't ride in bus lanes even when there are road works on the cycle path. Buses are really not compatible with bicycles, and there's nothing like them to lower subjective safety.
• 0:47 The blue disappeared again, but returns, apparently a bit narrower than before.
• 0:53 and it's gone again...
• 0:54 A bus stop in the superhighway. There are better ways of taking cyclists past bus stops.
• 1:05 Rough manhole cover nearly half the width of the "superhighway"
• 1:06 Again the red line goes to the other side and back again.
• 1:12 Another large manhole cover
• 1:16 The "superhighway" gets a bit thinner again, and then another manhole.
• 1:19 Railings against which cyclists can be crushed by motor vehicles.
• 1:38 Another bus stop
• 1:48 Another narrowing and then it disappears again
• 2:03 Another narrowing, right next to a left turn and a change in the style of white line. This could give the impression that cyclists have lower priority.
• 2:06 and another bus stop
• 2:08 Passing another cyclist, but the "superhighway" isn't wide enough to do this without pulling onto the rest of the road.
• 2:10 Disappearing blue paint again, right next to parking for cars so this could lead to drivers thinking they don't have to take any notice of cyclists going straight on.
• 2:15 The "superhighway" suddenly swerves to the left.

And that's the end of the video. I didn't note all the problems I saw, it was a bit repetitive. However, I hope I gave a good impression of why this is bad infrastructure. I have pointed out 24 possible problems which occur in just over 2 minutes of cycling.

Summary

What do we have here ? It's not continuous, it doesn't offer cyclists a more direct journey than drivers, there is no proper segregation from the road so low subjective safety, the on-road lanes are too narrow, the surface quality is bad (manholes etc.), there is no special treatment for cyclists at traffic lights. It's really an extraordinarily poor example next to what the Dutch are doing, without any of the fanfare.

For more on the London "superhighways", click here. To see what we get here in the Netherlands, click here.

Oh, London. You really need to try harder than this...

I covered London's proposed "cycling superhighways" before, showing the less than wonderful sketches made of what this infrastructure was supposed to be like. They've moved on now, and have some new images. Velorution pointed out that these look a bit like a bad high school project, but these really are what the transport professionals of London, 27th largest city in the world, thinks "superhighways" ought look like:

This shows a cycle path which is too narrow and has inadequate separation from the road. Our local standards call for a minimum of 2.5 m width for single direction cycle paths with 1.5 m separation from the road. For two direction paths, 4 metres is required. It looks like this. We're also not shown how this integrates with junctions. Something like this would be better.


This is again rather too narrow, and has an "interesting" turn left or right for cyclists wanting to go from the advanced stop box onto the cycle path. Left they've got a 90 degree bend, right there is a small island in the middle of the street.


Cyclists in the UK quite often have problems with buses, and cycling in bus lanes in Britain can be a thrilling experience. A bus lane is not a "cycling superhighway" even if there is a blue stripe in it. (Over here they keep you away from buses for good reason, even when there are works on the cycle path). PRESTO, a European programme to encourage cycling "For everyone as a daily transport mode" specifically recommends against combining buses and bikes.


This cycle path disappears and reappears on the pavement, and gives cyclists an opportunity to collide with bollards. Again it's much too narrow and inadequately separated from the road.


Extremely narrow cycle lanes, complete with railings on the pavement to make any collision with motor vehicles even more lethal.


Narrow cycle path gives way to side road. Over here you generally have priority over side roads. See the first link for examples in the city, and this link for the countryside.

Narrow on-road lanes with confusing overall design. Also note the extremely narrow width of the pavement used by the blue pedestrian on the left. However, there is still room for three lanes for cars.


Immediately after negotiating the crossing, cyclists are supposed to hop up onto the narrow blue part of the pavement by turning at exactly the right time on a very short piece of dropped kerb.


A junction at which cyclists may well have to stop more than once to get across. It doesn't have to be like this.

Merely putting blue paint on low quality infrastructure will not result in a boom in cycling. The majority need cycling to both feel safe and be convenient before they will take part. There are many much better examples which London could try to emulate.

For more on the London "superhighways", click here.

Recent events in London - and superhighways ?

Two recent events in London give a good example of what works for increasing the level of cycling and what does not.

First, Cycle Fridays. This is an attempt to get Londoners to cycle to work by accompanying them on the roads. On Fridays it's possible to ride with other commuters through the traffic to get to work. Six different routes to four destinations are on offer. On the best day so far, this attracted just 88 people shared between the six routes.

Second, the London Sky Ride. This involved closing 15 km of streets to provide a car free experience. 50000 people took part. Even that is only 0.6% of the London population, but it's orders of magnitude more than were tempted by Cycle Fridays.

I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again. If you want to see mass cycling, the experience has to be pleasant, safe and convenient. Riding in London traffic doesn't score very highly for any of these things, which is why it was less popular than "Sky Ride" which at least achieved two of them.

In attempting to grow cycling, Britain seems willing to try almost anything other than the only thing that actually works - which is... building proper infrastructure for cycling.

TfL's idea of a Superhighway.
Riding in in a blue stripe
with a bus in it.

London has made a lot of bold claims, but when you look at the details on the TFL website you find that their idea of a "cycling superhighway" is a strip of blue tarmac on the road as shown to the left (they've since removed this photo and put on some others which are equally unconvincing). They're not exactly aiming high. Even the artist's impression shows a bus in the cycle lane. This ought to be the "before" photo of a set of "before" and "after" photos, not what is being aimed at. It's really not remotely enough to attract mass cycling.

Segregation so complete as possible
in Assen. 2.5 m wide one-way path

Perhaps London ought to aim for something a bit more like this, which is not an artist's impression but something retrofitted to a few km of streets in Assen a couple of years ago. Get people away from the cars and they're more likely to be attracted to cycling.

Normal Dutch 2.5 m wide one-way
cycle-path. Behind the bus-stop.

Oh, and it's a good idea to make sure that bus stops are more like this, so that buses don't cut across cyclists. Buses and cyclists can co-exist very well, but not in the same lanes.

Neither of these examples of Dutch cycle-paths are described as superhighways, of course. They're simply efficient city cycle paths. Junctions on them have been shown previously.

Dutch superhighway by busy road.

The Netherlands also has "superhighways". They're called "fietssnelwegen" and are inter-city routes. These are built to high standards, 2.5 m minimum for single direction, four metres wide if bidirectional. So far as possible they have priority over side-roads so that cyclists can make uninterrupted journeys over long distances. The idea of these is to provide a network of fast inter-city routes right across the country which lure people from cars even over longer commuting distances. It has been shown that building even these is cheaper than not building them.

I have a similar path, though with somewhat more separation from the motorway, on my commute. It's designed so that high speeds are possible and I typically stop just once in 30 km.

Another thing London needs to address is that they are simply not aiming to put the routes close enough together for them to be effective. This was researched by the Dutch back in the 1970s, results were published. A very fine grid of subjectively safe cycle routes is essential for a high modal share. This successful policy has been followed ever since, leading to the Netherlands having the highest cycling rates in the world. Why try to re-invent the wheel ? And why do so badly ?

A miniature cyclist

That cyclist is not drawn to
actual scale.

Shortly after writing the text above I noticed something else very odd about the first fake photo from London. The cyclist is scaled down relative to everything else and is no taller than the gray car which is about the same distance away. This gives the impression that the cycle lane is wider than it is.

And another thing. I've had a few people say that London adding cycle lanes is a good thing and that I shouldn't be complaining about it. Here's the explanation: Yes, adding cycle lanes is a good thing. However, if they're going to describe them as "superhighways" then a bit more effort is called for. Compare what's on offer with a mere "fietsroute+" in the Netherlands, or indeed just an average "cycle-path".

London is planning down to a level such that it will fail to product a high modal share for cycling.

Update 11/10/2009: London has produced a video display which works by pedaling an exercise bicycle so you can see how the "superhighway" will look. This also doesn't look particularly impressive.

9/11/2009: TFL changed their website to get rid of the "artists impression" with the miniature rider above, replacing it with the super cheesy "supercyclehighway-man" seen on the right.

In other news, the "superhighway" is now revealed to be a 1.5 m wide cycle lane on the road, with the only unique feature being blue paint. Given that the minimum recommended width for an on road cycle lane in the UK was already 1.5 m, with 2 m being recommended in areas with more motor traffic, this doesn't sound all that "super"

What's more, the standards where we live now call for single direction cycle paths to be a minimum 2.5 m wide, and bidirectional paths to be 4 m wide. They are separated from the road by a minimum of 1.5 m. That's the measure of a "cycle path" here, without the hyperbole of calling it a "super" anything.

Finally, to see more about cycling "superhighways" in the Netherlands on a completely different scale (intercity routes which will cover the entire country), look at the other posts tagged with superhighways. These join up a dense network of routes which already cover the whole country.

We operate cycling study tours and would be very pleased to be able to help London to come to grips with what is required to achieve a genuine cycling revolution.

For more on the London "superhighways", click here. Don't worry that decent infrastructure costs too much. It's cheaper to invest in it than not to. Even the benefits to employers add up to rather more than is spent. So go on, London, do a proper job !