We can address cycling deaths in London, but we aren’t, argues Jim Jepps
Natalie Bennett poses with bicycles
“If Transport for London’s roads were a factory it would have been closed down with this number of deaths and accidents.” So said Hampstead resident Tom Kearney at Camden Council’s Road Safety hearing on Wednesday night. The meeting was triggered by the mounting number of cycle deaths in Camden and the desperate need to address road safety in London.
One of the things that was interesting about the meeting was the spectacle of otherwise straightlaced councillors laying into the powers that be. When they weren’t accusing the police of wilful inaction over serious traffic incidents that went uninvestigated, TfL committing to undertake important safety measures and years later not having moved an inch, to the hair-raising, but possibly justifiable, suggestion that TfL executives should be charged with corporate manslaughter as people die for their alleged criminal negligence.
While no one can prevent every accident the fact is that there are a number of dangerous junctions that are a genuine hazard to (primarily) cyclists and neither Boris Johnson nor Transport for London are taking them seriously as, they believe, the priority has to be “to keep traffic flowing”.
Leaving aside the obvious fact that cyclists are part of the traffic, we have a number of places where there are fast busy roads without cycle lanes, pinchpoints where lorries and buses contend with cyclists who get squashed in the limited space and an ever-growing number of cyclists on the roads.
The two recent fatal accidents of cyclists at the Bow roundabout stem directly from the mishandling of the so-called Cycle Superhighway. You and I might just see a bit of blue paint on the road with no actual dedicated space for cyclists but to Boris and TfL we have a key plank in their cycling infrastructure.
These deaths both occured in the exact same spot where the blue paint stops and the cyclist is dumped into the midst of some of the most feral, aggressive driving you’ll witness in London with no space to call their own. Boris has refused to address this because it a) means accepting all is not well with his high profile blue paint and b) he is avowedly opposed to anything that he thinks might slow down cars, even if it costs lives.
That’s one reason why getting rid of Boris is part of making London’s roads safer.
It becomes even clearer when we come to the Elephant and Castle a junction that Boris said was “fine [to cycle around]…if you keep your wits about you”. This is a junction that has, alone, seen 89 serious cyclist casualties in the last 24 months.
There are a large number of other areas of concern, like Blackfriars bridge, and King’s Cross, site of another recent fatality where there’s space for two lines of vehicles, which merge chaotically in the centre of the intersection, and none at all for cycles. Cyclists went out last weekend and took part in a ‘tour du danger‘ of the ten most dangerous junctions in London to highlight these hot spots. How many years are these concerns going to be raised with no action taken?
It’s extremely troubling that we have a Mayor and transport authority who have prioritised keeping Red Routes flowing and Olympic routes over the needs of road users who don’t happen to be motorised. What’s particularly gutting is that there are often low cost ways that have minimum impact on the main flow of traffic but the Mayor just doesn’t want to listen.
Across the UK there are five fatalities on our roads a day and around 1 in 75 of us have been bereaved by traffic accidents.
When my best friend at primary school was killed in a road traffic incident it wasn’t just a statistic to us, it devastated lives. Where we can prevent or lower the number of tragedies it’s only right that we try to do so. Right now one of our major obstacles is that Boris just does not seem to take this issue seriously.
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