A Mayor in May

On 3 May we Londoners will elect our new Mayor.

The Mayor of London has many interests. He or she will sit on many committees and pronounce on many things. But the only thing the Mayor actually controls is transport.

Moreover, he is the only elected official who controls Transport for London. London Assembly members can make useful nuisances of themselves. But only the Mayor can actually make TfL do anything.

You will hear claims that this election is about all sorts of things. But there is only one thing it can be about. Transport. It’s what the Mayor actually controls.

We all pay for the streets of London. Yet they are not safe for pedestrians and cyclists. And they will not be safe, convenient or useful for cycling until we elect a Mayor committed to making them so.

There are enough cyclists and cyclists-in-waiting in London to make the May election all about making the streets safe for all.

Londoners on Bikes is putting the cycling vote together. Voting as a block, we have the numbers to get serious commitments from the candidates. It’s never been done before in London. But it has been done in cities such as San Francisco.

The mayoral election decides who controls transport in London. Sign up at Londoners on Bikes, pledge to vote with your bike, and let’s get our streets safe to cycle on.

Campaign rhetoric

Dangerous bends

Merton Cyclists’ report on the failings of their council’s safety audits is magisterial.

While dry, the report repays study for its rhetoric alone. (Printed copies were distributed at the LCC AGM last month.) Instead of moaning about poor facilities for cyclists, the author describes how inadequate safety audit procedures, laxly applied, have created “a diseased road network”. (Remember that phrase.) He points to the £½-million cost of remedying faults on just one road.

The highway engineers responsible for this are not charged with being unsympathetic to cyclists, but being incompetent and negligent in their own profession, with taxpayers picking up the bill for their failings.

This sort of criticism lands hard on professionals. It can ruin careers.

It is a quite separate line from mustering political support for cycle facilities. Enough of it might even yield a push from below at TfL, with engineers insisting on observing their own rules.

Let’s see more of this!

enforcement@lcc.org.uk

Cars are not the problem. Almost every driver treats me with courtesy and consideration.

Then there are the few who rage. They are encouraged by roads clearly designed to “smooth traffic flow” – so what am I doing there, in their way?

The very large majority of drivers treat me decently simply because they are decent people. They would do so no matter what the condition of the roads. The few hoons (good Australian word that) see things differently. And the visible culture – the infrastructure around their vehicles – tells them they are right.

Cars are not the problem. Drivers are not the problem. Civility is the problem: a few uncivil drivers and a lot of uncivil roads.

Civilising measures (“traffic-calming” in the jargon) such as 20mph limits, mandatory cycle lanes and advanced stop lines are seriously undermined if not enforced. Failure to enforce suggests to drivers that the measures are advisory, are annoying distractions.

We need enforcement to establish the normality of driving at 20mph, of keeping a safe distance from cycles. Most drivers will do this anyway. They do not need to be told. But the hoons – the drivers who endanger us – need help to get this.

The police are not providing it. Recent FoI requests failed to reveal any FPNs issued in London for exceeding 20mph limits. Or encroaching on mandatory cycle lanes.

Private prosecutions are available when responsible authorities fail to act. Besides the usual function of punishment, they remind the hoons what the law is.

Let LCC establish a fund to be used for conducting private prosecutions. If the RSPCA can do this, so can we.

The big difference is that, while neglecting animals is widely vilified and relatively unusual, road rage against cyclists happens all the time. And a worrying number of people think it’s justified – all those Lycra louts.

Here’s a scheme to get best value from scarce funds. Establish a database for evidence. Ideal  evidence would consist of helmetcam recordings with a clear view of the registration plate and the driver’s face, and signed witness statements. Let evidence be emailed to enforcement@lcc.org.uk. LCC can index the records by registration plate. And, as funds permit, cherry-pick the worst cases for prosecution.

If this succeeds, then to some extent, police forces will be shamed into greater diligence themselves. We will have establishe it is ‘normal’ to prosecute such cases.

We shall also record many, many more cases than we prosecute. But when we prosecute, we should prosecute all the cases indexed for a vehicle, because, sure as eggs, the worst offenders will show up again and again in the records. And we can circulate police forces with an index of unprosecuted incidents, for them to draw on in the same way.

Think of the effect this would have on the current culture. At the moment we have a culture of impunity. Endanger a cyclist, even one with a helmetcam, and you would be very unlucky to wind up in court. But with enforcement@lcc.org.uk your fit of pique might be documented and filed, possibly without your knowledge, to come tumbling into court after the next, or the fifth, incident.

LCC could offer courses in how to record evidence. And take a cut on the surge in helmetcam sales.

And that’s to think about.

I was not elected last week as a trustee of the LCC, but things have been moving fast since.

Members approached me after the election, regretted I was not elected, wish to see the ideas pursued. (Not too bad a result from a 2-min presentation.) I promised to pursue  them anyway, just without the ‘mandate’ election would have given me.

Turns out the board’s ideas for the “Go Dutch” run quite close to mine. So co-option to one or two LCC committees seems likely.

Meanwhile there are rumours elsewhere of a ‘cyclists party’ single-issue campaign in the 2012 Mayoral election to mobilise a swing vote to force commitments to cycling onto the winning candidate’s platform. Stay tuned.

One rule to ring them all

Many favour introducing into British law a principle of ‘strict liability’ in adjudging fault in traffic collisions, following common practice elsewhere in Western Europe. This proposal isn’t making much progress. Let’s raise the game. 

As I understand it, absent evidence to the contrary, strict liability presumes the driver of a motor vehicle at fault in a collision with a cyclist. This determines civil claims – insurance – but not criminal proceedings, where it would remove the onus of proof. Its champions argue that French and German drivers accordingly give bikes more road space.

This proposal meets the usual objection. Benefits for cyclists are seen to be at motorists’ expense in a zero-sum game: a win for the cycling minority is a loss for the motoring majority. And why disadvantage law-abiding motorists in favour of cyclists, who ignore the law anyway?

We have to break out this zero-sum game. Time to go large.

Let’s instead advocate a general principle: the greater the danger you pose in a public space, the greater your duty of care.

This follows the Road Danger Reduction Forum line of addressing danger at its source, instead of controlling its potential victims.

Combine this principle with making collisions an offence and we start to get useful consequences. At present, police charge parties involved in a collision only if they find evidence an offence has been committed. Make the collision an offence in itself, and the question changes to – whom to charge?

The principle of greater danger applies. Absent contrary evidence, the lorry before the taxi, the Range Rover before the Mini, the cyclist before the pedestrian. We’re talking here about enforcing courtesy as the minimum standard of behaviour, the strong protecting the weak. And we’re not talking about fixed penalty notices, but criminal convictions, loss of driving licences, and so on.

This not only avoids condemnation as a cycle-specific measure, it responds to a widely expressed desire to prosecute pavement cyclists. Let’s make cycling on footways legal – and collisions an offence. That could unleash in Britain the swarms of peaceful pavement-cycling grannies I see in Japanese cities.

Our culture accepts minor collisions as part of the rough and tumble of the public roads. That is why so many mothers choose to deliver their children to school in a faux-military light truck, to resist intimidation by commercial drivers. Cyclists suffer – and die – in this rough and tumble. Time to end the reign of traffic flow as king.

Top Ten Junctions Tour swells

Camden, Lambeth, TowerHamlets and City LCC branches will join the Tour of TfL’s Top Ten Most Dangerous Junctions, which now looks more like 250+ riders. Spread the word.

Killer questions

The driver whose lorry killed Eilidh Cairns in Notting Hill in 2009 was fined £200 for driving with uncorrected defective eyesight. Private Eye reports he subsequently failed an eyesight test and had his licence revoked. Then last year he got it back. This year he was questioned by the police after his lorry struck and killed 97-year-old Nora Gutmann on the Marylebone Road.

The Cairns family has asked the High Court to quash the the “accidental death” verdict and order a new inquest. They argue that “There was a failure to consider the wider impact of Eilidh’s death and the huge problem facing cyclists in London.” From road.cc:

However, Jonathan Hough, representing the coroner, insisted that the incident was of a type that is “tragically common,” and that no element of it would lead the coroner to consider that it “illustrated a systemic problem or that it might call for some specific response.”

Here we see what follows from the vandalisation of our public space. The roads are dangerous. Sadly, some cyclists who insist on riding on them will die. People operating dangerous vehicles have a duty of care, but not the kind of duty of care that delays traffic.

Note the incoherence of the argument. Such “incidents” are “tragically common” – therefore there is no question of a systemic problem.

Cycling deaths are normal and require no wider inquiry by a coroner. Where is Judge John Deed now we need him most?

Camden & Islington Air Quality Summit, 21 Nov

Hosted by Camden’s Cabinet Member for Sustainability, Sean Birch, and Islington Council’s Leader, Catherine West, this event will bring together a range of expert speakers to share information on:

• the health impacts of air pollution
• how you can protect yourself from the worst exposure to air pollutants
• actions that can be taken at a regional, local, organisational and individual level to
• reduce air pollution.

Speakers include:

• Professor Frank Kelly, Kings College London – an overview of pollutants and health impacts
• James Grugeon, CEO, Environmental Protection UK – healthy air campaign
• Isabel Dedring, Mayor of London’s Environment Advisor – national and regional context
• Simon Birkett, founder of Clean Air London – proposals for London
• Sir Roger Madelin, CEO, Argent – enhancing the urban realm to improve air quality
• Lucinda Turner, Policy Manager, Transport for London (TfL) – TfL clean Air fund projects
• Justin Laney, Transport Manager, John Lewis Plc – alternative fuels and technologies for business fleets.

Read more…

Serious patrol

On the Woolwich ferry

The US Navy has a policy of sending warships through passages such as the Straits of Hormuz, lest anyone forget these are international waters upon which anyone may sail.

No one lives up there in the cold, but the Danish navy’s elite Sirius Patrol tracks around the vast spaces of north and east Greenland, lest anyone forget whose they are.

Apart from the motorways, British roads are open to horse riders, walkers, mopeds – and bikes. But on roads like the A406, it can be easy to forget that.

In September, James Brander of Camden Cyclists led a small patrol of the brave around the North & South Circular Roads, lest anyone forget these roads are for bikes too.

Next time, let’s make it a large patrol.

Gimme shelter

Lambeth has installed two on-street secure bike shelters in Bonnington Square, SW8. My neighbours and I have asked Camden for one in our street, for the many cyclists who have only communal hallways and the street itself in which to keep a bike. Camden planners have drafted a proposal.

Miki Yamanouchi took pictures of the Bonnington Square shelters.

Afterwards, tea & cakes at the Tea House Theatre – recommended!