Present:
Liam Mulrooney (cycling officer)
Roger Kite (road safety officer)
Roger Blake (town planning)
Dave Bracken (LCC)
Douglas Carnall (LCC)
Trevor Parsons (LCC)
Apologies:
The Police
Agenda:
1. Minutes of last meeting
2. Matters arising
3. New cycle stands
4. Cycle count
5. Exemptions for cyclists
6. Road collision reports
7. Consultation
8. Stoke Newington High Street one-way system review
9. Clapton Park
10. Shared use
11. Hoxton CPZ
12. Review of Shoreditch one-way traffic system
13. Cycle training
14. Date of next meeting
Agreed as a true record.
We spent a long time going over matters arising. Liam Mulrooney has been off sick for quite a while recently, and he apologised for not having had the time to pursue a number of the items discussed in September. Subjects which came up tangentially in this first bit included cycle theft (thinking about how we can encourage the local police to make it a higher priority).
There are lots of new cycle stands planned for the Dalston and northwards area - joint project between Dalston City Partnership, Hackney Council, and Groundwork - at around a dozen sites if memory surfs correctly. All the funders want to have their badges on the stands, as you would, and they want to make them rather spiffy and special...SO they have commissioned a new design due to be unveiled on Friday 19th at ten o'clock. The stands are reportedly rather taller and narrower than the standard Sheffield, so we should have a careful look and see if we like them.
It's now confirmed that there will be a big cycle count exercise next May, using the Regent's Canal and the River Lea as 'screen lines'. Canvassers will be counting cycles who pass those lines and also doing a questionnaire with people who don't mind stopping. The results will help to provide an idea of how many people cycle, where, how far, and maybe even why; and it will also allow us to come up with estimates for crashes per trip/length of time exposed etc.
In September we put forward the idea of listing all the places where right turns are banned for all traffic, and working out which of them we could get exceptions on for cycles. Liam said that this would be a huge task, requiring someone who can understand legalese to go through stacks of traffic orders, and we haven't yet quite cracked whether we can get this done/find someone to do it. But in the meantime Liam asks us to collect a list of prime candidates - we already thought of a few, e.g. Cecilia Road into Dalston Lane, but any more suggestions would be welcome. Just one more thing to think about as you're riding around.
We got a look at some 'accident' reports for an approximately 300 metre stretch of Queensbridge Road north from the junction with Whiston Road. It was agreed that this is one of the hairier streets in the borough, and, well, any suggestions for improvements will be welcomed. Douglas got to hang onto the printouts and maps so we should try to scan them and whack them up on the website for perusal and discussion.
The issue of consultation came up. There have been some notable lacunae in the consultation process recently, ie we weren't consulted about some fairly major schemes. This has been acknowledged (and apologised for) by the council officers concerned, and Liam is now compiling a new list of contacts for future consultation (including Hackney LCC, of course), and this list will be going to his colleagues in Traffic and Transportation and also town planning. So we hope for better there.
8. Stoke Newington High Street one-way system review
This is going back and forth between council and consultants (Mott Macdonald), and it's a fairly complicated business, as you'd imagine, but the basic idea is to make the high street two-way, with all or part(s) of it bus/bike only, sending the rest of the traffic round the by-pass, i.e. Rectory Road. [Poor old Rectory Road]. The story is, basically, the boffins are still working on it, and the devil's in the detail, but it's looking rather good whatever. We think so, anyway. 'Course, whatever's decided here will determine what happens to Church Street, and nothing much can happen there until the position with the High Street is decided. Don't watch that, watch this...
Money is being identified from various sources to do things to the streets round there with the aim of stopping through motor traffic from, er, motoring through. This would be achieved mainly by road 'closures', or OPENINGS, as we now prefer to call them, i.e. opening to people walking, standing, playing football, street hockey, riding bikes and all that. The mistressplan will also sort out a missing link in the northerly part of the Market Porters cycle route by reverting Powerscroft Road to two-way, getting bikes over Lower Clapton Road by traffic signals, making a faux cul-de-sac at the junction of Powerscroft/Almack Rd/Median Road allowing bikes and buses through only. That's the idea, anyway. As long as residents, who tend to have the veto on these schemes, are sold the idea positively, it should happen. Let's get selling.
Roger Kite, the likeable but cautious Road Safety Officer who attends these meetings, wondered if it was such a good idea to create congestion by making through motors use the main roads. It was great to hear Liam say that recent reports have shown that if you cut down journey possibilities for motorists, a lot of those journeys just disappear. And that if these proposals result in slower journeys for motorists on the main roads, well too bad. It's a pain for bus passengers, emergency vehicles etc., though, of course, but we have to improve the situation in residential streets and aim for any knock-on negative effect on main roads to be as temporary a condition as possible.
We heard that a concerned citizen is making a rather OTT stink in ?Clapton?Stokey neighbourhood about shared use/pavement cycling, and has set bureaucratic procedures in motion such that Liam now has to write an official report on the subject for committee (?Borough Services). Interestingly, this happens to coincide with Douglas being asked by the LCC centrally to redraft its policy on shared use, and Liam agreed that Douglas's input could be invaluable in producing his report. There was unanimous agreement at the meeting that the 'problem' ('two-wheeled terrorists' etc) is perceptual rather than actual.
Our detailed comments are being considered, and some have been agreed already, most notably the reservation of Fanshaw Street for a contraflow cycle lane westbound. Liam and Paul Douglass went to have a look today. They say they'll probably just whack yellow lines in for the moment, and then work on the contraflow together with the linked issues of what to do about the one-way sections of Hoxton Street and Pitfield Street. Those, in turn, are of course inseparable from following item.
12. Review of the Shoreditch One-Way Traffic Scheme
This is one of those about which it's a shame we weren't consulted a bit earlier, when the brief for the feasibility study was being worked up. It seems plans aren't quite as advanced as we first thought; that's to say that the only really significant thing about the feasibility study results was that it has established the principle that general two-way working on Shoreditch High St and Great Eastern St won't cause the sky to fall in. Liam assured us that there's still plenty of time and opportunity to consider the issue of contraflow cycle provision.
The meeting finished off with the traditional quarterly exchange of views between LCC in Hackney (this time in the person of Douglas - it's usually Patrick who takes this role) and Roger Kite (the aforementioned Road Safety Officer, who is also Hackney's official cycle trainer) on the subject of the feasibility of training school students. The background this time was that we are now recruiting cycle trainers from our membership (see current newsletter). Roger's experience is that he has had catastrophically limited take-up when he has offered training to schools, and counsels caution and the focussing of our energies towards adult training. Douglas responded by urging more enthusiasm, talking about the need for a broad approach to tackle all the related problems, in the schools and on the streets, which are suppressing the undoubted desire for children and young people to get around by bike.
10th March 1998
