The Phone Box - How the F..k did THAT get there?!

 

 

The image of the Kingston’s telephone box blocking the footpath forcing pedestrians to step into the path of cyclists is symbolic for all that is wrong with the shit fest that is cycle planning in the UK.  

Hopefully, Manchester’s Bee Lines will be an exception to the rule, if the excellent Cyclops junction introduced recently is anything to go by. 

But by and large, there are far too many crap cycling lanes built in the UK. All manner of roadside furniture and hazards including trees are left in place on cycle lanes around the country.

Kingston's £32m cycle scheme, with its telephone box and, worst of all, the dangerous “bus stop cycle lanes”, could be a microcosm of what we could end up with if ever the government does fund a national cycling policy.

I wonder if Cycling UK, those guardians of cyclists’ rights, have challenged the misfits in Kingston, and looked into any of this?

I’ve had no response to my telephone calls and emails to their campaign department and their magazine. This could be because staff  are working from home due to the pandemic. But if anything has been written about these issues I’ve not seen it.

John Meudell’s report below concludes the sorry Kingston tale.

 

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As highlighted previously, the choice of cycle infrastructure configuration in Kingston has made it difficult to design junctions, bus stops, loading bays, etc., writes Meudell.

The designs adopted conspiring to create conflicts that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

 

And don’t talk to me about lines-of-sight, which, as far as the highways engineers and designers involved are concerned, don’t exist. 

 

Let’s talk about that phone box outside the University…..

Think about a pedestrian walking towards the phone box, effectively blocking sight lines around it?  And what happens if a pedestrian inadvertently pushes a baby buggy into the cycle lane without looking?  It just takes a moments inattention on the part of both pedestrian and cyclist.

 

And real irony?  Look closely and you’ll see the phone box isn’t connected to anything…….

 

But the real question is…how did cyclists and pedestrians end up with a (disconnected) phone box blocking the footpath?  And, given its been there for more than a year now, why is it still there?

 

Bear in mind that the cycle infrastructure in Kingston has its genesis in the award of £32m from Transport for London in 2014 to improve safety and convenience for cyclists.  In the years immediately following award, detail was added to routes planned under the Go Cycle programme strap line.

 

Furthermore, Kingston University has a major re-development under way adjacent to the phone box (the new Town House and frontage) planning of which took place in approximately the same time frame. 

 

Developments such as these have implications for utilities such as BT, a statutory undertaker, all of whom would have been consulted in the early stages.  And the phone box has been in that location for many years, well before both developments were proposed.

                                  The phone box in pre-cycle lane days

 

So, it’s not as if any of the major players in the phone box fiasco, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, British Telecom and Kingston University didn’t have or were given plenty of notice and had time to consider the implications. 

 

All the major players have been involved or consulted and/or interacted with at various stages in the planning and development of these projects, both in general and in detail, and arrangements for relocation of the phone box could easily have been concluded well before work commenced.

 

So, it’s not as if this is a communication problem.

 

 

Kingston have at least £32m to spend on the Go Cycle programme and the University has spent around £50m on development of the new Town House building and re-development of the frontage of adjacent university buildings where the phone box is located.

 

So, it’s not as if this is a money problem.

 

Even worse, local politicians have (unhelpfully) got in on the action, using what is a planning, design and engineering process issue, to score political points rather than solve problems.

 

https://www.kingstonconservatives.com/kingstons-32million-cycle-lanes-being-mis-managed-by-libdems-%EF%BB%BF/

 

And it’s most definitely not a political problem.

 

 

Most large organizations I have been associated with have clear processes for development, design and construction of capital projects, usually with decision “gates” to minimise (if not eliminate) risks, be it financial, schedule and/or physical.  Physical risks will not only include those to their own staff but also construction workers, project users and the public at large.

 

Not to do so would run not only the risks identified above, but also consequential reputational risks that could seriously damage the future health, if not existence, of the organization. 

 

 

Design input for the Kingston infrastructure projects would, or should, have included information gleaned from safety audits at each stage of the process, part of statutory obligations on highways authorities aimed at ensuring (and, dare I say it, improving) the safety of those using the highway.

 

So why is it none of the safety risks of the scheme; including junctions, bus stops, loading bays and the phone box, were ever recognised, whether by the designers or, perhaps more importantly, by safety auditors?

 

And, even if they were recognised, why is it nobody could be bothered to do anything about them?

  

The case of the phone box, as with all the newly created hazards, demonstrates the failure of processes and the people and organizations participating in them.

 

Given the amount of money that has been spent on these projects, are any of these people and organizations involved going to voluntarily admit that they cocked-up, let alone do anything meaningful to eliminate the hazards…….?

 

Without a national regulator overseeing and informing and assuring design and engineering processes and people, accountability (or lack of) is a major, major, contributing factor. 

 

 

So, will anything change, system-wise?

 

In my experience that’s highly unlikely in Kingston, or the rest of the UK, even if somebody (dare I say it) gets killed or seriously injured as result of crap infrastructure.

 

………something that’s definitely not the case in the Netherlands!