Kings Cross Environment

TfL has launched a panicky review of major junctions across London in response to overwhelming pressure from cyclists, local politicians and media outlets.  As part of this review, TfL has admitted that some junctions are ‘challenging’ for cyclists.  TfL says:

We’re reviewing cycle safety at all junctions on Barclays Cycle Superhighways and major junctions on the Transport for London Road Network (TLRN).

The review supports our other cycle safety initiatives, including our cycle safety action plan and work with HGV drivers.
Which junctions will be reviewed?

We’ll review all junctions on the existing Barclays Cycle Superhighways (routes 2, 3, 7 and 8), focusing on 50 key locations.

We also plan to review 150 major junctions on the TLRN. The majority of these are locations where work is already planned and is being designed.

Additionally, we’re looking at a small number of junctions where no scheme is planned, but where it is felt that there are particular challenges for cyclists.

So why is this review panicky? Firstly TfL admits that some of its junctions present

‘particular challenges for cyclists’

This is an amazing admission – TfL has been in charge of these junctions for about ten years during which time there has been an explosion in cycling.  Yet, despite TfL’s loving engineering and safety culture the junctions remain challenging for cyclists.  To my mind this is a prima facie admission of a breach of TfL’s duty of care to people who use its roads.

Secondly, only in November last year the Chair of TfL (Mr Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, also Mayor) in the Assembly was firm that engineering solutions, remodelling junctions and putting in specific cycle lanes were largely not the answer in the exchange below with Caroline Pidgeon (AM) –

You have got to be honest and sometimes, Caroline, it is not the case that you could materially affect the outcome by engineering. You have got to be honest about this. You cannot just tell people that it can all be magically changed simply by rebuilding roads

And third, in the same exchange in the Assembly the Chair of TfL says that junctions ‘are under constant review‘

So what’s going on here? TfL already has these junctions under constant review, their Chair has said so – where are the results of this constant review?  Why is another review needed? Why, when the junctions are under ‘constant review’, has TfL admitted that the junctions remain challenging for cyclists (in one tragi-comic instance the TfL cycling superhighway review team went to Archway and refused to ride around it, dismounting and pushing instead)?

Overall this review shows a bureaucracy on the run, terrified that they are to be held to account by the media and the courts.  But there is one team that comes out of this winning – the TfL PR team they’ve done a magnificent job of suckering The Times into seeing this as a victory for their #cyclesafe campaign as London leads the way, rather than the shabby cover up of a decade of mismanagement.

That Pidgeon/Johnson exchange in full below, for more see our earlier post.

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): Yes, but what I am asking is will you commit to make sure you review these junctions personally and particularly the cycle superhighways. A lot of cyclists that I talk to see it as just some blue paint on the road and at some of the very difficult junctions – whether it is Oval or Stockwell – you have not really tackled some of the more expensive mechanics that you need to make at those junctions to make them work and safe for cyclists.

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL): Of course. That is why –

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): Of course – is that a yes?

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL): They are under constant review and I can tell you that I personally cycled all of these areas and I have strong views –

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): And reviewed them?

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL): — about them. I make my views known to TfL. You have got to be honest and sometimes, Caroline, it is not the case that you could materially affect the outcome by engineering. You have got to be honest about this. You cannot just tell people that it can all be magically changed simply by rebuilding roads –

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): It is not just engineering – it goes along with training and some of the other measures from HGVs that I welcome. I still want you to be reviewing those dangerous junctions to make sure you are doing everything you can.

As part of our public service commitment  I have dug out the debate in the Greater London Assembly on cycling safety on  November 9th 2011 so that we can see what politicians of all parties said before a major media campaign burst out from The Times.  This debate went under the guise of questions to TfL.  I am grateful to our colleagues at Camden New Journal for first reporting this at the time – I admire the fact that the Journal still does things the old fashioned way and goes to stuff and reports it.

Anyway, the transcript of the debate is hidden away inaccessibly on the London.gov.uk website so I have extracted the bit on cycling verbatim and put it in an easy to browse google doc – anyone can see it you don’t need an account or login.  You can also download it as a word document here.  The Chair of TfL (Boris Johnson, also the Mayor)  puts in a bravura defence of TfL and ducks and dives all over the place on whether junctions should be re-engineered to make them safer for cyclists. Mr Johnson’s statement that junctions are ‘under constant review’ is fascinating – if they are under constant review why is so little timely action taken to make them safer?  Some of his sweeping comments about engineering solutions to make the road safer beggar belief as you ride through Kings Cross.  Thanks to Caroline Pidgeon AM and Jenny Jones AM for pushing hard.

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL): When you look at some of these roundabouts, for instance, it is simply not possible to put in a dedicated lane that would protect a cyclist in the way that we would all want without totally disrupting the traffic…..

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): Yes, but what I am asking is will you commit to make sure you review these junctions personally and particularly the cycle superhighways. A lot of cyclists that I talk to see it as just some blue paint on the road and at some of the very difficult junctions – whether it is Oval or Stockwell – you have not really tackled some of the more expensive mechanics that you need to make at those junctions to make them work and safe for cyclists.

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL): Of course. That is why —

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): Of course – is that a yes?

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL): They are under constant review and I can tell you that I personally cycled all of these areas and I have strong views —

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): And reviewed them?

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL): — about them. I make my views known to TfL. You have got to be honest and sometimes, Caroline, it is not the case that you could materially affect the outcome by engineering. You have got to be honest about this. You cannot just tell people that it can all be magically changed simply by rebuilding roads —

Caroline Pidgeon (AM): It is not just engineering – it goes along with training and some of the other measures from HGVs that I welcome. I still want you to be reviewing those dangerous junctions to make sure you are doing everything you can.

Jenny Jones (AM): Commissioner, thank you for your letter that you have written to me about the Kings Cross cycling death. You have offered a briefing on the whole junction which probably Val Shawcross and Caroline Pidgeon would also like to be part of. Yes, to that briefing.

Boris Johnson (Chair, TfL):  …Jenny, I really respectfully appreciate you raising this up the agenda because I take this incredibly seriously and it is of huge personal importance to me because I feel that I am the Mayor who makes a big thing about cycling and goes on and on about how wonderful it is that we have got our bike hire scheme and that we have had a 15% increase in cycling in the last year.  I am very proud of it so of course it really worries me when I read about cycling accidents.  It grieves me sometimes to see the way that TfL is blamed.  If we can do anything to ameliorate the junction that you describe, or the roundabout, and if that would really address the problem then of course we will look at it.  Sometimes I do not think that physical street works are the answer.  The answer is, very often,  to educate HGV drivers and to educate cyclists about the need not to be, as I said in my earlier answer to Caroline, caught in that position on the left.

It’s great to see cycle safety on the front page of a national newspaper.  The Times is thundering away about the need for urban cycle safety following the serious injury of one of its young reporters who remains in a coma.  Kaya Burgess at the paper has been championing cycle safety for a while and it’s great to see him hit the front page.

The campaign is a great start, but I wonder if it isn’t a little naive in exhorting reviews and new bureaucrats such as cycle commissioners.  Years of hard nosed campaigning leads me to think that this sort of thing will achieve little.  In London the Mayor will announce a review of whatever he feels like that will report conveniently far after the Mayoral elections.  One or two high profile junctions will be fiddled with but the systemic problems of the Mayors traffic flow policy will continue.

The people who work in and run our major civic bureaucracies know what needs to be done to make cyclists safer at persistently dangerous junctions.  They just make the chilling choice not to do it.  They put cars and ‘traffic flow’ first.  To my mind campaigners now have to take the courts to hold our politicians and bureaucracies to account.  This is why we have driven so hard here on holding TfL to account for corporate manslaughter over the Deep Lee death in Kings Cross.

Prosecutions though mean the police upping their game to initiate prosecutions of people in councils that they work with day to day to manage safe roads.  In London the Mayor is in charge of the police and TfL, which makes things very complex indeed.