Category Archives: pedestrians
20mph and a Speed Management Strategy
Just as we learn that Portsmouth City Council are working towards a 20mph speed limit throughout their city, and just three months after Darlington Cycling Campaign’s call for similar measures in our town were dismissed as too ambitious, I accidently come across a consultation process for Darlington and County Durham’s Speed Management Strategy.
Naturally enough, the Campaign was not alerted or informed about this consultation process, and the deadline for responses is today, June 4th. One of the key objectives of the proposed strategy, which is billed to run until 2011, is to reduce the risk to vulnerable road users. Hmm, wonder if that might mean cyclists?
If anyone can manage in the next couple of hours, you can email comments on the strategy to traffic.management@darlington.gov.uk.
Good Time to Review Ambitions
15 months ago, The Guardian published a feature story by Matt Seaton about Darlington’s ambitions as a Cycling Demonstration Town. The article was based on a long interview with then Cycling Officer Oli Lougheed.
Despite Oli’s apparent chipper attitude to his job, with £1.5m rolling in from Cycling England to spend over 3 years, he moved on to Manchester shortly afterwards. But the article is instructive in laying out both the short-term ideas and long-term ambitions/vision of the local authority.
As we argued at our recent Symposium, the local authority alone can be quite good, if they get it right, at short-term plans. Witness the near doubling in cycling in Darlington over the past year. But long term ambition requires much more. Some quotes from the Guardian article are instructive:
Under the new scheme, Darlington’s transport team plans to put in nine or 10 “radial routes”, running from the periphery right to the centre….The new radial routes will reassign priorities where they intersect the ring road, and will make all the formerly pedestrianised areas dual use. The philosophy here is that cyclists can coexist perfectly safely with walkers, European-style; where it is clear that an area is dual use, cyclists automatically adjust their behaviour, slowing down and riding sensibly….”The object is to create boulevards rather than traffic corridors,” says Tim Crawshaw, the council’s chief designer of the public environment.
“The difficult thing is that you build the infrastructure and promote it,” says Lougheed, “but it takes years for people to change their habits.”
The hierarchy of road users that transport officers like Lougheed now work to reads as follows: disabled and visually impaired people first, pedestrians next, then cyclists, public transport, delivery vehicles, cars used for business with more than one occupant and, at the bottom of the heap, single-occupancy motorists.
As I cycle down a broad residential street with Lougheed, he tells me how a simple measure like taking out the central white line will reduce traffic speeds. Without the sense of a safe, segregated corridor down which they can drive at 35mph, motorists instinctively move towards the middle of the road. But then they become aware of needing to drive more slowly in case they meet a car coming the other way. All of a sudden, they’re driving at 25mph – just because a white line has been taken out.
The Cycling Campaign has been doing considerable research on peoples’, and especially motorists’ habits. Yet we see very little sign yet of these being challenged by, for example, reassigned priorities where radial cycle routes intersect the inner ring road. Indeed, the current works behind Marks and Sparks indicate otherwise – cyclists will cross the ring road with pedestrians at a Toucan crossing.
With Darlington something like half way through its Cycling Demonstration Town period, this would be a useful time to reassess these ambitions:
*Were they really there in the first place, or was this just media spin?
*Will we still get our 10 radial routes, or have some been dropped?
*What happens when radial routes hit the inner ring road?
*How does the hierarchy of road users tally with the allocation of road space?
These and many other questions should not only be asked of the council. The reason why ambitions change or get dropped is as much through political opposition as lack of political will, and in Darlington there are certainly at least two outside lobbies who are doing everything they can to keep cycling at the very bottom of the hierarchy or road users.
But Darlington cannot simply “demonstrate” to the rest of the country what can be done. We also need central government support to get further up that hierarchy. Depressingly predictable, then, that our leaders failed to see the connection between the recent petition to 10 Downing Street (to give cyclists and pedestrians priority over motorists at minor road junctions) and their “new orthodoxy in transport planning”, the hierarchy of road users. RIP Joined Up Thinking.
Cyclists and Disabled Unite (NE Edit)
An slightly edited version of the letter Richard sent to the Northern Echo was printed in today’s paper.
You can read Richard’s original letter: Cyclists and Disabled Unite and the leter as printed in the Northern Echo.
Cyclists and Disabled Unite
Today’s Northern Echo has a letter in its Hear All Sides section from Gordon Pybus, chair of Darlington Association on Disability. Here is the Cycling Campaign’s reply:
Dear HAS,
What a pity that Gordon Pybus, of all people, encourages prejudice. His letter (HAS 15th Feb) damns all cyclists as “a real danger to pedestrians”, before demanding that we use a cycle route of his imagination (“there is a cycle path around the ring road”) instead of the Pedestrian Heart.
I leave the question of Tim Stahl’s evidence that cyclists usually come off worse in collisions with pedestrians to him – he did work for many years in the Memorial Hospital’s A&E after all. But public evidence does show where cyclists get hospitalized – the ring road, where 45 cyclists have been seriously injured since 1988, and one killed. “I believe that motorists provide a real danger to cyclists” is a phrase that has all the backing of cold statistics, but not all motorists are dangerous, nor should they be banned from the ring road.
Gordon calls for cyclists to “be in the correct setting”. Well, we wholeheartedly agree. Please let’s look more closely at the bicycle as a unique form of transport, and not as some kind of “motor vehicle without a motor”. “Correct settings” are finally appearing here and there in the town, designed with cycling in mind, and not by the bizarre visions of car driving traffic engineers.
But even these “correct settings” are not going to segregate us from disabled pedestrians. Cycle paths are actually very pleasant surfaces for wheelchairs, and I see no reason why they should not be used as such. As Darlington Cycling Campaign continually stresses, we want to encourage responsible, considerate cycling in the Pedestrian Heart. It really is time to wake up to the fact that there are many ordinary citizens in Darlington who also cycle, and do not wish any harm on others.
But there is another reason for encouraging cycling in the town – to make our environment and our people healthier. Because Darlington is a Cycling Demonstration Town, we now have a unique chance to make a collective difference by making cycling safe, attractive and convenient to people who currently drive their car on short journeys (how many town centre pedestrians arrive by car, I wonder?) . That is why cycling needs to become less of a war of attrition with the motorist, and more a pleasant way to get from A to B.
So come on Gordon, stop building walls between us and chasing us back on to the roads. Sign up for the Cycling Symposium (http://cyclingsymposium.blogspot.com/) on March 17th and join other good-willed people in trying to make that vision a reality.
Richard Grassick
Chair, Darlington Cycling Campaign