Cycling in Hackney News
August 1999/September 1999
Contents
The AA flunks out with a D-minus! - Motoring organisation looks foolish on the Seven Sisters question
You’ll remember from April’s Cycling in Hackney News how we successfully persuaded Hackney’s traffic planners to go for wide bus-and-bike lanes on Seven Sisters Road.
When the Hackney Gazette dangled news of this audacious roadspace redistribution plan in front of the AA’s press office, its response was predictably weak: tax payments made by car owners entitled them to this brief and pointless acceleration over an isolated wide section of the road before merging again to a single lane in each direction.
We thought you’d like to see Tim Evans’ patient and effective reply in the Gazette, making the argument for sanity.
“It’s got some useful stats for those New Internationalist-type conversations,” jokes Tim. “You know the ones: ‘Well, acksherly, I think you’ll find 99% of motorists have very poor sex lives’ etc.!”
One stat that the AA could have done with knowing before they put their feet in their mouths was the overall effect of the roadspace redistribution on through motor traffic flow.
Neutral. Ooops!
Tim’s reply to AA criticism:
The AA seems to think that because motorists pay taxes, space for cars should come before all else on Seven Sisters Road. The national costs of motoring have been calculated at £42 billion in road deaths and casualties, damage to health through pollution, landscape, ecology, noise and cutting up communities. Motorists pay only £16 billion in taxes - not even half. In Hackney, 61 per cent of households have no car, but the 39 per cent minority’s use of cars is paid for by us all - in premature deaths and ruined amenities as well as in cash.
But this ‘motorists v the rest’ view is wrong to start with. We are all pedestrians and public transport users, and many people are both cyclists and drivers. Some journeys are certainly best made by car, but research shows most car journeys are short enough to walk or cycle. London needs transport planning which encourages Londoners out of cars by making it easy and pleasant to cycle, walk and use public transport, where appropriate - like the Seven Sisters Road plan. This would benefit AA members as much as everyone else, there will be no competition and no ‘losers’, so come on AA, let’s have less knee-jerk and more brainwork.
Calculations from research at University College London commissioned by the Environmental Transport Association (ETA), supported by the RSPB and the CPRE. Fair Payment From Road Users? A Critical Look At The Calculations For Air Pollution is published by the ETA.
Car ownership figures from www.hackney.gov.uk.
Mixed reception for Interim Transport Plan
Hackney’s transport plan for 2000/2001 has received a guarded welcome from the LCC’s Hackney co-ordinator, Douglas Carnall.
In a response sent to Robert Biggs, who oversees travel and land use, Douglas said:
“We are delighted with your vision of developing ‘safe, clean, accessible, and integrated transport’, and with your commitment to motor traffic reduction and the necessity for a modal shift from four wheels to two feet and two wheels.”
But Douglas Carnall criticised the Plan for not making more of the new road user hierarchy. [The hierarchy was certainly present in last year’s transport plan. Ed.] And he drew attention to the ‘implementation gap’, as evidenced by the need for a struggle to get the Council to adopt the necessary radical solution for Seven Sisters Road.
Another gap in the plan was the under-recognition of the adverse effects of speeding vehicles on people and the local environment:
“A clear commitment to reducing motor traffic speeds would be the single most cost-effective policy that the Council could adopt to achieve its safety and modal shift objectives.” He added that the borough should adopt a universal 20 mph limit.
Douglas also urged the Council to think in more comprehensive terms about the role of cycling, arguing that all roads should be part of a cyclable network.
“All projects must be considered for their cycle and pedestrian accessibility,” he said. “We expect the Council to use the new for cycle audit and cycle review procedures. Cyclists should be consulted, but the council should lead on the design of all schemes with regard to cyclists’ needs.”
Remembering our planning bloodhound
Dave Bracken would have been proud - and perhaps a little embarrassed about the fuss. The people in the Stoke Newington Save the Reservoirs Campaign are proposing a memorial to our much-missed ‘planning bloodhound’ and community stalwart, nearly a year after he died.
One idea is for a new bench to be installed in his memory on the banks of the West Reservoir which he helped to save. Donations can be sent to: Penny Couve, 2E Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, London N16 0HX. Make your cheques payable to ‘Save the Reservoirs Campaign’.
Summer of love
Thanks very much to everyone who helped make our various bike week events happen.
Our bike park at the Stoke Newington Church Street Festival showed for a second time that a bike parking service was very much in demand, and it also proved to be a magnet for people to chat and swap information about cycling - and even to part with cash in exchange for maps, books and t-shirts.
It was rather a shame that, once again, there was no publicity for the service - we were down as a ‘cycle display’ in the programme - but we can always try to improve things for next year, eh? There’s definitely room for bike parking to be offered as a service to many such events, on a more integrated basis.
The sun shone again on our bigger, better bike breakfast on June 18th, at which we had the opportunity to swill coffee and cakes and welcome a pleasingly large contingent from Hackney’s Land Use and Transportation group, who enjoyed themselves trying out some of the more unusual bikes round De Beauvoir Square.
Later in the day - after all the fun and games in the City - Claire Tansley’s ‘Bike the Bounds’ ride gave a leisurely opportunity to enjoy all the diversity of Hackney, ending up with a very enjoyable barbecue at Equal Play, at which the accessible cycling project’s brilliant ‘sociable’ bikes got a good testing!
Hackney’s future bikes hit MTV screens
Our borough’s booming population of futuristic recumbent bikes will soon be splashed across the globe in a new pop promo made by local film-maker (and cyclist, need one add?) Jez Benstock.
His company Technobabble’s new vid for tekno-popsters Orbital, shot recently in an underground car park in Hoxton, featured several local easy-riders, including David Moreno of Bikefix on his Kingcycle ‘Espresso’.
Fees were waived on all sides so that all the money earned could go towards production of an upcoming anti-homophobia film.
Cyclist killed on bridge
On April 29, NATO missiles attacked a bridge in Trstenik, killing a woman who was crossing the bridge on her bike and wounding 17 others.
Source: CounterPunch (www.counterpunch.org)
Loadsamoney for travel to school...
School students in Hackney will soon be helping to devise their own solutions to the problems of travelling to school, thanks to £1 million of government money awarded to Groundwork, the grassroots environmental trust, in the Hackney and West London areas.
The SRB cash is to create a three-year, high-profile pilot programme to develop an all-agency approach to planning safe, attractive, healthy and educational routes to school for young children, mostly from urban estates.
Ten demonstration projects, based on estates and travel to school areas, will bring parents and children together with teachers and local authority planners to implement practical physical improvements as well as improve communications and raise self-esteem.
The programme aims to provide opportunities for effective linkages with parallel initiatives in this and other fields of public and voluntary sector service, including Hackney’s own Safe Routes programme, Sustrans, the London Walking Forum, Health Action Zones and the New Deal for Communities.
Individual projects will include: piloting a system for identifying and signing safe routes, designed with children; facilitating alternative travel-to-school options; promoting independence of mobility; and changing attitudes.
Contact Groundwork Hackney on 0208-985 1755
...but peanuts for London Cycle Network
What could you do with £80,000? Have a great party, for sure. But you wouldn’t be able to make it go very far towards redressing our borough’s major deficit in cycle-friendly infrastructure.
But that’s all the London Cycle Network (LCN) money Hackney’s getting for the next financial year. And three-quarters of it is already earmarked for consultants’ fees.
Hackney Council has little choice in the matter. The money comes from central government sources, and those sources have dictated that £60,000 will be spent on evaluating existing LCN routes. The good news is that this should then be followed a year later by a large injection of money to raise the standard of the routes quickly.
Meanwhile, urgently-needed improvements such as the Shacklewell Lane/St. Mark’s Rise junction remodelling have to wait.
Broxes on the streets of Hackney
Seen those four-wheel recumbent cycles moving Red Star freight round town lately? You’ll soon be seeing them closer to home as a new delivery service starts delivering groceries and prescriptions to elderly people in sheltered housing.
Deliveries will be made by Brox quadricycle, courtesy of E-mission Control - providers of the inter-station service for Red Star Parcels. They hope that the service will expand to serve the needs of other housing associations within Hackney and create a viable business.
Officially being launched in August, the ‘Greenfleet’ project is a partnership between Groundwork Hackney and the New Islington and Hackney Housing Association (NIHHA), whose tenants will be the first to benefit.
The project is being funded by NIHHA’s Community Investment Fund with assistance from another charitable funder interested in supporting sustainable transport initiatives and will run for an initial period of six months.
Groundwork Hackney say they are also trying to secure some use of the vehicle for local authority deliveries, as a demonstration project to support Local Agenda 21.
