What is holding Cycling back?

Continuing the blog “The Marriage of Success to failure”.

The tale so far.  We have established that our celebrated Olympic and Tour de France champions have become the toast of Britain, while at the same time, next to nothing is done to improve the safety of ordinary cyclists using the roads.

Proof of this came recently, with that latest fuck up – par for the course - the government’s dismal level of funding for their own Cycling and Walking Strategy announced at the end of March.

To recap on last week’s news.

Here’s what the CTC’s  Policy Director Roger Geffen and British Cycling  Policy Advisor Chris Boardman said of this debacle.

Geffen “Despite its laudable aim to normalise cycling and walking by 2040, this strategy’s draft targets suggest that, outside London, English cycle use would eventually reach Dutch levels by the start of the 23rd century…”

Are they having a laugh? As Ricky Gervais would say!

That’s 200 years to reach today’s Dutch cycling levels – which are 27 per cent of all journeys made by bike -  compared to under two per cent in the UK.

At the government’s new rate, cycling levels would only reach 3.5 per cent by 2025!

The brilliant and much admired “Get Britain Cycling Report” called for cycling levels to increase to 10 per cent by 2025 and to 25 per cent by 2050.

Here’s what Boardman said: “The Department for Transport has done some good work on cycling and walking, including developing processes to make it easier for local authorities to create infrastructure plans and identifying funding pots that could be used. But these are just baby steps. Far more ambition is needed if we have any hope of creating a cycling and walking culture to rival countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, let alone the government’s own modest targets.

“The truth is that without sustained funding, this strategy won’t be worth the paper it’s written on. We know that when faced with other priorities like road maintenance, saving bus routes and new housing developments, cycling and walking will be put at the bottom of most councils’ to-do lists.”

So that’s where we are.  Nowhere. Again.

From  my many talks with Roger Geffen and his predecessors when I was in harness at Cycling Weekly, I understood that tireless campaigning had eventually succeeded in winning the minds of the government, if not entirely the minds of Local Authorities! 

One of the major turning points came when the CTC had the  Department for Transport hauled before the Parliamentary Select Committee on Transport, oh it must be over two decades ago. The DfT were charged with doing nothing to improve cycling conditions, and they were mercilessly challenged by the committee about this.  As a result they were obliged to mend their ways, and they did mend their ways.

A DfT cycling team actually began working with the CTC, and some good work would emerge over the years, benchmark ideas. Of course, they never did get very far because they were never given adequate funding.

By far the greatest success of recent years was the Get Britain Cycling Report identifying precisely how to improve cycling conditions as part of an integrated transport system. The Report was debated by a decent sized House of Commons and applauded by all parties.

Even the Prime Minister gave his support, whispering sweet nothings. For he declined to give it Cabinet backing!  He - and the other puppets in his government – stick to the mantra “it is for the Local Authorities to implement the Get Britain Cycling Report”.

It isn’t, never has been, never will be. Because they have no money,  no political will, no special expertise at all.

So there we are, bang up todate, banging on the walls of the Cabinet Office and Treasury. Are these the last two walls to be scaled before finally, we do “Get Britain Cycling”?

We need to understand our past if we are to understand the present, if we are ever to have a future.

This is my take on the many false dawns these past 50 years, my take on all the political  shit that has held cycling back, half a century of political indifference to making the roads safe for cycling.

John Grimshaw, the cycling visionary who gave us hope

The car takeover crept up on us at snail’s pace from the 1960s onwards, and we failed to notice.  Over the years, we hardly noticed how children’s play grounds - the side roads serving housing estates- began filling  up, first by cars going up and down, then by parking on either side, or on the pavements. I used to play footie with my mates in front of our house.

Now, many vehicles have invaded the pavement for parking space, denying even this to the kids, making life difficult for those with prams. 

But there was one engineer who 50 years ago didn’t like what he saw happening. His name is John Grimshaw, who wanted to include cycling and pedestrian’s needs into road plans. But he might as well have tried swimming against the tide. Other planners didn’t understand! His experience led directly to the creation of Bristol based CycleBag in 1977, and they built the Bristol to Bath cycling and walking path, the first such path along a disused railway. CycleBag became the charity Sustrans (Sustainable Transport) with Grimshaw as CEO.

They began turning those disused rail routes across the country into linear and leafy traffic free paths for cyclists and walkers.

Some of them became incorporated into Grimshaw’s far grander development, unique in Britain, the remarkable National Cycling Network (NCN). This now covers 14,500 miles in the British Isles, a mixture of bridleways, canal and river tow paths, and quiet traffic-light lanes, linking villages, towns and cities.

An estimated 3.1 million people used the NCN in 2012.

This was a dream which became reality. And Grimshaw was made an MBE in recognition of his enterprise.

Sadly, he was in the hands of local authorities who have in some places been unable to avoid routing the NCN along main roads, mostly where it enters towns. But in the main, this is a cycle path safe from traffic.

He has a yet unfulfilled dream.  He’d hoped that the NCN would be a catalyst for the introduction of cycle networks in the towns it passed through.

Instead, Highways Agency planners,by their own admittance, have little knowledge of how to plan for cyclists. They work to make roads ever more efficient – for motor traffic.

They turned their attention to smoothing out corners, speeding up traffic accessing side roads, once considered peaceful havens where children would play.

Kerbs have been  shaved to allow traffic to enter them from the main road without losing much speed, so as not to hold up the bumper to bumper stream hard up their arse.

It’s a higher tempo here than in Sweden, that’s for sure. I recall how my Swedish nephew on a visit to the UK becoming quite alarmed at the speed of our taxi drive to Gatwick Airport.

Funny thing is, I thought our speed was acceptable! No speed limit was broken!

Which perhaps suggests that even the speed limits are set too high!

Anyhow, back to cycle networks. There is another big network of cycle routes of note, the National Byway, another charity.  This covers 3,300 miles around England, parts of Scotland and Wales.

It’s aim is to provide a scenic route along rural lanes linking villages and market towns, specifically keeping to roads with as little as 2 per cent of motor traffic.

The routes connect 1000 places of interest, including eight World Heritage sites.

And it was routed by Michael Breckon, a former racing cyclist, Canadian Olympic  cycling team manager in 1972, involved at the highest level of the sport all of his life and more recently devoted to creating quiet byway routes for cycle touring.

Not without having to overcome political indifference in some quarters, leading him to say to me once that in Britain there prevails a "can't do" mentality. 

However, much of the British main road system to the cyclist and walker can often appear to them as a vision of the corridors of Hell itself. Instead of fire there is the stench of pollution and the noise of engines, often nose to tail, all of a rush.

Cycling campaigners trying to bring some balance to this one-sided development, can be likened to missionaries working among the heathen.

The roads remain motor roads. A few of them in the cities, very few, have a cycle lane, marked with a white line and the symbol of bike stenciled on the surface, providing some breathing space for the bike to take its rightful place.

Now and again, newspaper headlines tell of a new cycle route connecting a school – a one-kilometre length of path!

In Hove, the authorities removed one cycle lane after complaints that motorists were being held up!

The battle has been long and hard and shows no signs of abating. Meanwhile across Europe good progress has been made these past 60 years, a balance struck to allow cycling to play its part as transport.  There is great understanding in many towns and cities, respect on all sides.

An A&E doctor in the Midlands, sickened at having to deal with the weekly carnage from motoring collisions, once called for cars to be made of plywood and for a six-inch steel tungsten spike to be mounted in the dashboard of each and every motor vehicle.

That would concentrate minds, he said. He was being sarcastic.

But the fact of the matter is, if traffic was to be slowed down, if steam was made to give way to sail so to speak, cyclists could share the roads without fear and there would be no need for special facilities anywhere but at big junctions.

So the push continues, for engineers to rip out the road network and to completely redesign it. It will cost £billions.

We need cycle lanes the equal of traffic lanes in size, along all major routes, or beside them.

All enquiries to Pipe Dreams Incorporated.

Next week: Exposing the lie of London's cycling "Superhighways"