FORMER Olympic Champion Chris Boardman has promised
a “quiet revolution” to take back the roads from cars and get people cycling
and walking in his new role as head of Active Travel England (ATE), he told The Guardian’s Peter Walker.
Oops.
Mind your language when mentioning cars, Mr Boardman, in case the petrol heads
get wind of this!
If we dare allow ourselves to dream a for moment, could
Boardman’s enterprise be the game changer for cycling as transport?
The signs of change are already there with the
revised Highway Code calling for drivers to be prepared to give way and give space
to vulnerable road users.
I can think of no better person to lead this latest
initiative to get cycling as transport firmly established in the minds of
planners who need to be dragged screaming and kicking into the 21st
century.
It is only right that the young, the old and the in-between,
can feel safer on the roads when cycling those many shorts trips instead of
always driving them.
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| Three cyclists and 100s of cars in Bristol |
If the Olympic champion can do for other towns and cities what his publicly acclaimed Bee network for walkers and cyclists promises to do for Manchester - once and if it’s finished - dare we hope government will at last provide the £billions necessary to make the roads safer?
Inadequate funding, that’s the issue. For although
the £millions being awarded for various cycling initiatives do some good, it will
take £billions to get to the heart of the matter.
But still less than the £27bn earmarked for road
improvements!
As head of Active Travel England Boardman will award
funding for cycling and walking schemes and also look keep a beady eye on
design.
Crucially, ATE is a statutory consultee and their
remit extends beyond roads to big developments to make sure planners design in
access on foot and by bike, not just by car.
Councils risk losing funding for substandard
schemes, which will include bikes lanes distinguished only by a painted line,
or if they delay work.
Boardman’s organisation will inspect work in
progress and annual reports will rank councils performance in the same manner
as Ofsted with schools.
Boardman says they will offer to help in design and
also judge it. He will have the power to say the work is not good enough!
That will be interesting for him, given that many
engineers know bugger all about designing roads with cyclists in mind. And it was
an engineer who told me that!
Boardman says it is essential motor traffic no
longer is allowed to dominate local roads, a situation made worse by rat runs
identified by satnav.
Add to that the ubiquitous school run where parents
feel pressured to drive their kids to school because the roads are unsafe,
thereby making them even less safe!
We must hope that no one sees this as an anti-car
crusade, particularly the Daily Mail and the Daily Express usually so quick to
defend the so called rights of the roads lobby.
The last guy to try reducing this unhealthy dependency
on cars was Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in the 1990s with his proposals
for an integrated transport policy. His boss, Tony Blair, considered this a
vote loser.
He stripped Prescott of his transport brief and
binned his proposals and all was right in their world.
Surely we have moved on, and want to encourage
cycling and walking instead of always driving. Most journeys we make are five
miles and less, ideal for cycling.
“This is about enabling, and encouraging once
you have the safe space,” says Boardman. “The message is: this is for people doing
normal things in normal clothes, just having the choice of not having to do it
in a car. And it’s in all our interests to face up to that.”
“We have a finite amount of space, and there’s
over 20bn more miles being driven around homes
than there was a decade ago,” Boardman said. “We’ve co-opted local streets to
soak up traffic that roads were never designed for. It’s not going to be easy
to unpick, but it’s really worth it.”
“Kids don’t have a choice to drive – they have
to be driven. And these are their roads and streets, too, and they have the
right to use them.”
Boardman,
previously commissioner for Transport for Greater Manchester, was first
motivated to work for safer cycling upon the realisation that the roads around
his home were too unsafe for his daughter to cycle to the park 500 metres away!
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| Royce Road junction on a section of Manchester's Bee Network for cyclists and pedestrians. |
He suffered personal tragedy when his mother was killed by a driver while he was campaigning for safer cycling.
Reality Cheque
Cycling development is routinely underfunded by government writing piddling cheques for amounts which fall well below what they know is required for the grand schemes necessary to promote the bike as transport.
Or schemes are given nothing at all, as was the case with the
national cycling strategy launched by the Conservatives in 1996.
The Secretary of State for Transport, Sir George
Young, himself a cyclist, said the strategy didn’t need money because any costs
would be incorporated within the roads budget generally. That was all very well
and as it should be for new schemes.
But crucially, the so called strategy took no
account of costs to redesign the existing roads and junctions laid out without thought of how cyclists and pedestrians were to manage. Some have since been adapted, but many are most unsatisfactory.
It took a Labour government to put a bit of
flesh on the strategy in 2005, creating Cycling England with the paltry sum of
£5m.
Nevertheless
Cycling England was brilliant. Their cycling
advocates Christian Wolmer the transport journalist and John Grimshaw of
Sustrans, the father of National Cycle and Walking Network, identified and
worked with nearly 30 towns to help create small but impressive cycling schemes.
A cycle lane here, hire bikes there.
They proved that if you provide for cycling more people will cycle.
And
then a decade ago the Conservatives killed the initiative stone dead.
We
must hope that Boardman’s ATE does not go the same way. It’s been a long haul
to move cycling up the agenda.
I
am reminded of the Friends of Earth’s campaign “Reclaim the Roads” back in the mid-1970s.
I still have their manifesto on how England should improve road conditions for
cycling. A huge cycling demonstration was held in Trafalgar Square, and I
joined thousands of cyclists to ride to Downing Street, where the report was
delivered to Number 10. I naively
thought that cycling’s time had come. Nothing happened.
The
report probably went into the shredder.
That
was 50 years ago.
We’re
no nearer calming the roads now than we were then.
Over
to you, Mr Boardman, save us from the *Petrol Heads.
*Petrol
Heads. This species probably evolved in the late 1950s as car ownership grew in
popularity and led the government to believe they needed to provide as many
roads as possible to satisfy this desire to drive everywhere.
This
led to the government commissioning the Buchanan Report in 1963. It was all
about cars, nothing about trains, bikes, buses, walking. All about cars.
Buchanan
presented plans to have motorways carved into the heart of every town and city.
London would be encircled with a series of huge ring roads.
Plans
were abandoned when it was realised tens of thousands of homes in London alone would
be demolished and city centres destroyed. But not before work had begun in
various cities – if your town has a huge highway that suddenly comes to an end,
that’s probably the mark of the Buchanan Report before it was halted.
For
more on Buchanan read Christian Wolmar’s transport perspective Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain
has no Transport Policy).
You
will be alarmed.
Then
pray Boardman succeeds in his quest.
