Monday’s Friday Reads – 13 April 2020

1. Re the Guardian piece on turning streets over to walkers and cyclists….
   What’s that phrase? “Never waste a good crisis”.
   But isn’t that exactly what Mayor Khan and Will Norman have done? They claim they want to rebalance London away from road traffic and give more priority to pedestrians and cycle users. And yet, whilst other major cities – from Berlin to Bogota – have made an immediate land grab and repurposed road lanes from cars over to pedestrians/cycles, Will Norman has dismissed this, saying it wouldn’t improve safety in London. As pavements across London are often much less than 2m wide, it is impossible to follow the social distancing advice without stepping into the roadway – into the path of speeding traffic. (It is often speeding – the Met police have reported an alarming increase in serious speeding incidents)
   I am beyond baffled at the attitude in City Hall.

2. ID
   Waltham Forest ( Led by a councillor who plainly “knows where all the bodies are buried” ) have actually done this.
   Removed the bus lanes & narrowed the roads to put in cycle lanes …
   Which has promptly made everything worse.
   The buses, carrying mothers with children & shopping & the elderly & infirm are stuck in with slow-moving, polluting traffic, whilst 2 or 3 cyclists whizz past. And, of course, the pollution has got worse, too.
   A triumph of ideology over practicality.

3. The “Manchester” article repeats something I ( & I suspect all of you ) have seen many times before: “Half of daily trips in Greater Manchester are less than 2km, and 62 per cent of those trips are made by car. ”
   Which is bonkers.
   Unless I was carrying something really large, bulky &/or awkward I wouldn’t dream of using a car for so short a journey.
   WHY are people doing this – it must be counter-productive, surely?

4. I agree with Greg’s feeling of irritation about short car journeys, which is probably a nationwide phenomenon. There are of course a number of other good reasons which can justify short car journeys, but even with them included, there must still be a good number resulting from pure laziness.

   Good reasons could include passenger or driver with limited mobility, taking the car to or from repair/service etc.

5. Re short car journeys:

   2km is getting on for half an hour’s walk. If you need to pop to the shops and get something, given the choice between spending an hour doing it and 15 minutes doing it, it’s not that illogical

6. Herned
   That is what bicycles are for!

7. @ Greg

   Yes, absolutely I agree, but when it’s November and raining horizontally it takes a lot of willpower to not drive

8. It may be that people doing short trips by car view their individual journey as not having much impact on the environment compared to a long journey, so can’t see the point in walking. The bigger picture of course is rather different.

9. I once, incredulously, watched a neighbour opposite jump in his car and go 150m down the road and back to post a letter. He was a fit rugby playing type as well, often going to the gym, by car of course. I would have tutted if anyone else had been listening.

   The Manchester side road idea is genius, and beautifully implemented with appropriate research and evidence. It seems they might set a precedent for much wider application. I toyed with the notion of entire residential streets zebra-striped for a cut price shared space approach, but that would probably dilute the impact of the world’s most recognised road marking, never mind the aesthetics. My tip of the day is to invest in road paint suppliers.

10. @Herned,
    I did read of a cyclist who kept a diary and reckoned he got wet 25% of days on his commute. He lived in Yorkshire and rode 45mins over a high moor to get to work.

    Most of us, it is more like 10%, especially if your ride is more like 10 mins to the station. Most well-inhabited places, it rains a very low proportion of hours in the year, even in December.

    if like me you have a regular journey you always cycle (because someone else in the household has a greater need of the car), then of necessity you have good raingear. Soon you take very little concern of all but the heaviest downpours. We did keep 2 cars for a while. But one dry month the second car didn’t move for 5 weeks and its brakes froze on.

11. The zebra crossing story is a wonderful example of British rules requiring something – in this case Belisha beacons – that make it safer, but at an utterly disproprtionate cost – in this case up to about 50 times the cost of a paint-only zebra as seen in most countries. Result, we can afford many fewer zebras than would be useful.

    I participated in an efficiency review of the Train Protection and Warning System. It was selected by transport minister John Prescott to be Britain’s cheap-and-cheerful automated train protection system, 75% of the protection at 25% of the cost. Unfortunately once the HSE had been at it, they made it cost about 2 or 3 times as much. But the increase in safety so produced was only of the order of 2-5% on the same scale as the previous numbers. This expenditure was utterly disproportionate to the increase in safety produced. (Other cost increases meant it ended up costing about the same as the original cost estimate of the fully automated system.)

    But the way the law was written there was no grounds for criticising the HSE. They were just doing their job according to the law, and responded aggressively to any suggestion that their actions were in any way counterproductive. The fact that it completely invalidated John Prescott’s original decision was neither here nor there to them. Doubtless they’d have done a similar job if he had gone for full automated train protection and made that a lot more expensive too. That is why my view remains that what is wrong with health and safety in this country is the law. It is the law that makes people spend utterly disproportionate amounts on small safety improvements.

    Back to zebras. There is this zebra in London where, riding my bike in hours of darkness, suddenly I stared to have a high rate of near misses with pedestrians. I soon realised why. The issue was that Camden had just installed some super-bright new LED Belishas. You could see the zebra very well. But the contrast of very bright Belisha versus poorly lit people made it hard to see the people on the zebra. I quickly spotted neighbouring Westminster understood this issue much better. Westminster have sideways floodlights at busy zebras which are designed to illuminate the people on the crossing so road users spot them more easily. I did write to Camden to tell them about their unfortunate zebra design. They ignored me. But eventually they woke up partially to it, and did reduce the brightness of the Belishas. Another example of spending money in a way that fails to address the big issue.

    Yet another point about zebras. I find people often misunderstand the different purpose of pelicans as against zebras. Even transport planners. For the most part, pedestrians love zebras, and would much prefer them. It results in almost no waiting time for them. Always give the pedestrians a zebra, unless there is a really good case for a pelican. Sometimes you have to have a pelican because the road would otherwise be too scary to cross – it would otherwise be too hard to stop the traffic and safely cross, for example on some multi-lane roads. But the main reason you need to change from zebra to pelican is that there are too many pedestrians. Now you need to stop the pedestrians from time to time to give the road traffic enough road capacity.

    With this appreciation, we now realise how foolish are so many pelicans about town. If the pedestrian traffic and the road conditions are good enough for a zebra, everyone, especially the pedestrians, are better off with a zebra.

    Another tedious problem with pelicans are those that are set to have a minimum pedestrian waiting time every time they are pressed. By all means ensure that it doesn’t turn red as soon as it has just been operated. But if it has been a while since it was last operated, then it should operate immediately it is pressed again. There’s some lights like this on our “high street”, and it exacerbates severance.

12. The lights near me seemed timed to wait until a car is present before stopping traffic to let a pedestrian cross. Infuriating as no one wins when that happens.

    As well as your change (faster activation if the button is pushed and pedestrians haven’t had a phase in a while) there is one other change I would make if I was king.

    All pedestrian crossings would detect rain and default to the pedestrian phase until things dried out again. In wet conditions, cars would only get a green signal after arriving at a sensor and waiting for it to change.

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