London cycling strategy: wait is nearly over

Just hope that the strategy is family & schools inclusive
.. Fingers crossed !

I agree with Saif. All my nephews and nieces, who live in Hamburg, cycle to school everyday. Here, it's unthinkable. I'll judge Andrew's success or failure by whether or not cycling to school becomes the norm. Good luck!

Good luck, but remember you can only get about 10% of people onto bikes if they are shared with other road users. Kerbside separated cycle paths are the ONLY way to increase usage above this figure as shown in Scandanavia/Netherlands. They are also massively safer for all road users. Good luck!

There may be a 'lot of money'; such a shame, though, that there is £41 million less money than there would have been had Tory assembly members not voted down last week's budget amendment that had almost entire cross-party support.

Such a shame, also, that there is much less money due to the Mayor's and TfL's obsession with gimmicky projects such as Cycle Hire, 'Super'highways and the Cable Car; and their inability to extract commensurate private sector contributions for turning these projects - and with them London - into massive billboards.

I await tomorrow's strategy with interest. But with a legacy from the Mayor of gimmicks (dangerous ones at that), poor value for money and jobs for cronies in key appointments (of which I fear Andrew Gilligan may just be the latest) sadly I'm expecting little.

Andrew, exciting stuff indeed and well done for getting us to where we hope to be tomorrow. Of course you will need a tin hat and flak jacket, as we all have different views on how to make cycling a world class affair in London, but you are listening to others and gaining feedback which is always a great start.

We seem to be standing at a genuine crossroads; we have a real Olympic legacy to nurture and a real sense of increased cycling on London's streets. I hate to admit it, as imperfect as they are, but perhaps the cycle superhighways have helped here - see I said it. However, I experience very real danger on the roads every day and shame on those that try to pretend this isn't the case.

The All Party Cycling Committee seems to have gathered some genuine and valuable insight that could be used to great effect in London. If there is one thing I would hope it is that the findings are very carefully considered. We need positive action - not just political positioning.

Best of luck.

" It took 40 years to turn even Amsterdam into Amsterdam, with the kind of cycle facilities it has now". If we start with that attitude nothing will get achieved. The Netherlands achieved a level of cycling that we only dream of in a much shorter time frame and look what Seville have done in just 5 years. Let's hope the announcement is extremely ambitious and inclusive enough to make it attractive for children to cycle to school.

Welcome and good luck Andrew - but I agree with Markyjl on your '40 years' point.

As David Hembrow points out in his iconic blog today (http://bit.ly/WJKftg), once The Netherlands agreed on a cycling strategy, it took less than a decade for them to have transformed enough of their streets sufficiently to make waves in Britain - and "Children for whom campaigning took place in the 1970s actually got to experience the results for themselves before they were adults."

The danger, if our leaders don't start purposefully adopting best practice for our streets now, is that in ten years' time, London's future cycling czar will be saying that Amsterdam has had a *fifty* year head start, and so it would be terribly 'shrill' and unreasonable to expect fast change.

Will be following with interest.

Incidentally, sad that this coincides with the ongoing case of people being prosecuted for riding bicycles where the Met Police didn't want them to.

http://road.cc/content/news/76967-trial-opens-nine-cyclists-arrested-cri...

Certainly, London existing organisations have a long way to go to accept cycling as a legitimate and equal form of transport.

Lets give it a chance, Rome wasn't built in a day, but it turned out pretty well in the end...

Hi all,

Welcome to Talk London and thanks for your comments so far.

Andrew has been out and about today, busy launching the new cycling vision with the Mayor. He has, however, managed to post you up an update linking to the actual vision document. Just wanted to flag it up to you in case you hadn't seen yet.

Do tell us what you think of the new plans!

Thanks!

Wendy

Talk London Community Manager

I have just read through the report. If it could be achieved, and if it world work, wonderful. But what absolutely horrifies me is the proposal to learn from the Olympics experience in relation to reducing daytime traffic in London. For residents this was a nightmare, because so many deliveries took place at night instead of during the day, when they cause problems enough! In the centre of London all day, every day until late evening the air pollution levels are above the WHO guideline levels. Noise pollution is above WHO guideline levels by night and by day, except for Christmas night. This means that the health of workers is being damaged, but the health of residents is being damaged even more. Noise is not just 'nuisance. It causes the changes that lead to heart disease whether you are awake or asleep, whether you are used to the noise or not. Children especially suffer from this and from air pollution which is causing babies lungs to fail to develop properly. The road lobby has long been pushing to have restrictions on night time deliveries lifted, and the Olympics gave them the ideal test-run period. But residents were not told about this, and most did not make complaints to LA noise teams about the nocturnal deliveries during the Olympics because it was in a good cause and only temporary. Therefore the evidence base used - not that residents' health has any weight with them anyway - was distorted. Now we are threatened with deliveries being banned during the day, and initially night time deliveries being encouraged by lifting restrictions, which means they will all take place at night. A much worse situation than residents experienced during the Olympics, as only some companies switched to night deliveries then. Noise regulations do not sufficiently protect residents from deliveries noise anyway, and residents have found that recently noise officers are much more reluctant to stop night time deliveries. These deliveries often come in gigantic vehicles with roaring engines and howling reversing alarms. The tailgate lifts are horrendously noisy, the pallets of boxes are crashed around inside the vans, noise echoing through the residential side streets, trolleys going from van to shop sound like large motorbikes, and the drivers and other staff bang everything possible and shout repeatedly to each other. A residential side street can be a delivery point for quite a few stores on a nearby shopping street, and many stores have several large vans arriving each night, at around the same time or in succession, or if from different companies, a few hours apart. This means that deliveries noise can wake up residents, including young children, repeatedly through most nights of the week. To this add the stream of private waste collection vehicles that roar through central London every night, both rat-running and collecting waste. A neighbourhood of a few small streets can have several of those during each night, with much reversing with alarms, grinding of compactors, and accelerating along the roads.
If Boris Johnson and cyclists want to shift deliveries to night times, they must either find the funds for installing acoustic secondary glazing in the residential side streets that are used by delivery and waste vehicles, or find equivalent homes off these routes for central London residents and compensate them for the extra commuting costs they will have to pay to get to work. Enough is enough.