Boardman's 'quiet' revolution

 

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 21^st 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.

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! 

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.

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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.