In 2000, London’s previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, began the process of fixing forty years of mistakes that had been made in the pursuit of the impossible — the comfortable accommodation of mass motor vehicle use in a dense city centre. He recognised that cities are supposed to be places for people and returned key locations like Trafalgar Square to use as more than mere traffic gyratories.

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I did a double take when quickly scrolling through old phonecam pictures.

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Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

This is the view from my office kitchen back when I had that real job (before I gave it all up to do this instead).  The sun is rising over the city, with the Docklands towers just visible, pale in the distance between the Barbican towers.

The street in the foreground is Mount Pleasant. You can just see the Rosebury Avenue viaduct between the houses left of centre.  Just poking into shot on the left is Mount Pleasant sorting office, the central hub of the London sorting offices.

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It is wrong to think in terms of “private” versus “public” transport.  That is important only to the bureaucrats who have to manage transport problems and fund transport solutions.

What matters is social versus anti-social transport.

Originally posted at At War With The Motorist.

The post is implies, that there is a huge latent demand for cycling in the UK, which will translate into actual cycling if the infrastructure is provided. The truth is that many adults in the UK prefer to drive a car, live in a low-density suburb, and at least accept (if not prefer) a longer commuting distance. They will not cycle, regardless of what infrastructure is provided.

Perhaps some people in this country do still love their suburbs.  But most British people fell out of love with identikit low-density suburbs decades ago.

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Now I just need to know whether to buy the Renault, which promises to save me “secs” (a reference, I understand, to the roof, which retracts in just nine of them):

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On the urban motorway that is Whitechapel.  Whitechapel should be the quintessential neighbourhood High Street: it has the tube station, the bus stops, the shops and pubs and library — sorry, “Idea Store” — and the street market that these vans supply.  As Andy Cameron would put it, Whitechapel has a very high “place status” — it is not an anonymous transport route but a destination, somewhere people go and things happen.  It’s not a part of London that I frequently have reason to visit, but every time I do it is packed with people living their lives.

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LAs are told to take into account existing local car ownership rates when doing this.  Fair enough, but why aren’t they also told to take into account the elasticity of modal share in the local area?

The line reminded me of the comment made recently by Andrew Boff, summarising the views of Conservative members of the London Assembly, who recently rejected the idea of a “road user hierarchy” which puts cyclists and pedestrians above motor vehicle users:

“It is true that we [the Conservatives] are, by instinct, anti-hierarchical and I agree with you that we should be making decisions to accommodate people’s choices not what we think their choices should be.”

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This was during the first of the student protests last year, when Conservative Party HQ was smashed up for the cameras.  It was long over by this time, but there was still a large backlog of arrests being processed in the background and obviously it was still the top story on the rolling news channels.

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