Quality Streets

Please take a moment to write to your local Councillor to ask for our streets to have a 20mph limit and ask your friends to do the same. Sustrans have set up a website with a link to help you write to your Councillor: http://www.quality-streets.org.uk/

TfL's Journey Planner and the London Cycle Network

I've got to get from Old Street to Lewisham this afternoon. TfL's Journey Planner proposes a back street route which I'm sure will be one of the London Cycle Network (LCN) routes. It's got more twists and turns than Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. I'd be happy to give it a go if I knew it was an identifiable, signed route.

The trouble is that most of the LCN is a convoluted mess for reasons I won't go into now. However there must be a couple of routes that are pretty well thought through and signed, such as LCN 3 in Lambeth from Clapham to Waterloo.

So, how bloody stupid are TfL that neither their Journey Planner nor their Local Cycling Guides (aka maps) flag this handful of useful, signed routes up.

The consequence is that I'll be taking the Old Kent Road instead of TfL's suggested route. I know I can follow that without stopping every couple of hundred yards to peer at a map at dusk.

Where does Road Tax go?

There is no such thing as Road Tax, though the Advertising Standards Authority doesn't object to car advertisers using the term.

Some motorists strop about cyclists not paying road tax and object to them using the roads. The reality is that roads are paid for out of general taxation, such as council tax.

Anyway, motorists actually pay Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) based on their vehicle's CO2 emissions, so a cyclists would pay £0 even if they had to pay.

But, for a moment, let's pretend Road Tax to spend on roads exists and raises the money that VED raises.

In 2009 government revenue from VED was £5.63bn.

I don't know how much gets spent on roads each year, but I do know that the 2009 contract just to widen a mere 22 miles of the M25 motorway (which cyclists can't use) was £3.4bn

'War on the Motorist'? I don't think so.

Mind you, I can't help but feel that a better use of that cash would have been to build a splendid motor-traffic free cycle route along the south bank of the Thames.

Saturday afternoon on the South Bank

Outside the former Aquarium and the Eye, clearly too congested at this time to cycle, so people with bikes will get off and push them. Pass under Westminster Bridge so you're opposite Parliament and the situation at the same time on a Saturday afternoon is entirely different

Plenty of room for people to pootle on their Boris Bikes - a perfect Londoner and tourist use of the Thames Path that local politicians and employers aim to ban. (Catch up on Thames Path blog posts here)

The powers don't talk of providing an alternative traffic-free cycle route along the Thames with views of Parliament, yet this road in St Thomas' Hospital grounds is clearly perfect for that role. You can follow it around to the entrance of St Thomas' and then straight across the Toucan to Belvedere Road.

The joy about pootling along the Thames on a bike is that a few quiet minutes later you're halfway to Battersea, able to look back where you came from.

Finally, an iconic view of Westminster Bridge and Parliament, with the obligatory two ice cream vans trading while parked on the red route, bus lane and cycle lane. (Catch up on the Ice Cream war here)

Architecture Ride: Deco Decadence - Sat 27th Nov

Lambeth Cyclists have a track record of excellent Architecture Rides and their next looks set to be a real hit.

Deco Decadence
or, West London in the Jazz Age

Saturday 27th November 2010
http://www.lcc.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=2137

The Art Deco style, which swept through Europe in the '20s and '30s, brought the streamlined glamour of Cadillac cars and Cunard liners to the design of everything from town halls to teapots, forming an elegant bridge between the Classicism of the early 1900s and the Modernism of the mid-century.

In London it is above all the style of the suburbs, whose characteristic building types - cinemas, tube stations, factories and roadhouses - became the classic expressions of the architectural new wave.

On this ride we'll be looking at some of west London's sexiest Deco confections, from the famous to the frankly obscure; prepare for glimpses of jazz-age sophistication where you least expect them...

** Meet outside Tate Britain, Millbank SW1P 4RG, at 10.30am for a 10.45 departure
[web map in link above]
Lunch at the Anglesey Arms, Wingate Road, nr Ravenscourt Park W6 0UR, about 1pm
Finish at Ealing Broadway, about 4.30pm.
No need to register, all welcome. Queries - Philip: 07960 026450 07960 026450

Ride led by David Garrard of English Heritage

A Lambeth Cyclists Architecture Ride

Eye, Eye, Eye, What's going on 'ere Mr Kafka?

This weeks Lambeth Life states that the London Eye is the most popular paid tourist attraction in the UK, with 3.5 million visitors annually.

Before developers are given permission to build the council negotiates something called S106 Funding with them -  a charge to mitigate the impact of a development. For example if a developer wants to build 500 houses they may be required to build a new school to cater for the influx of new residents.

A clearly forecastable impact of permitting the building of the tallest Ferris wheel in Europe opposite Big Ben would be hugely increased numbers of people using the Thames Path and one trusts that S106 money would be used to ensure continued access to the rightful existing users of the Thames Path, such as cyclists (see the markings in the tunnel above).

Instead, in a Kafkaesque nightmare, London Eye S106 money has been used to commission the South Bank Employers Group, now chaired by the man who runs the London Eye, to write the South Bank and Waterloo Cycling Strategy, which in its draft 100 page state recommends banning cycling here.

Wouldn't it be better for that S106 money to be used on widening the Thames Path, for example by creating a cycle track on the St Thomas' Hospital space adjacent to the Albert Embankment part of the Thames Path.

Kennington Killer finally banned for life (and 7 years in jail)

In June 2009 Dennis Putz, drunk driver of a 32-tonne tipper truck, killed cyclist Catriona Patel by Oval tube station at the junction of Kennington Park Road and Harleyford Street. He's been sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from driving for life.

But, when you find out his driving history, I expect you'll be asking how the hell the authorities allowed him to have a licence to drive a 32-tonne lorry and how many similar drivers are legally permitted to drive on our streets.

The Streatham Guardian states, "It was revealed during the trial that he had 20 previous disqualifications, three drink drive convictions and three previous convictions for reckless driving."

London Cycling Campaign reported:
The court heard that Putz had been jailed twice before for driving offences, a six-month sentence in 1995 for reckless driving and, in 2003, after 16 counts of driving a lorry while disqualified.
He was first disqualified from driving as a teenager, but still managed to get a licence and work as a HGV driver.

I expect you're also wondering about the recruitment and operating standards that companies operating this type of lorry have. Companies such as Thames Materials Ltd., Dennis Putz's employers.

I'm sure there would be a public inquiry if such appallingly lax standards resulted in a train crash. In 2009 there were just over 222,000 road casualties in Great Britain, with 26,912 people killed or seriously injured. This is surely unacceptable.

Is it any wonder that people prefer to cycle on traffic-free routes such as the Thames Path instead of the adjoining A road alongside St Thomas' Hospital.

I have received another email from a parent replying to my request for volunteers to send their children to ride this road, given the local politician's plan to ban cycling on the Thames Path.

"I am definitely not going to let my daughter, who daily cycles to school, do your proposed journey."

I think the parent shows admirable common sense given that the licensing authorities and employers allow people like Dennis Putz drive 32-tonne lorries on our local roads.