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news
Kingston Mini Holland impression (source LB Kingston)Enfield, Kingston and Waltham Forest get £30m each to become Mini-Hollands
The London boroughs of Enfield, Kingston upon Thames and Waltham Forest are each to get around £30 million in funding as part of Mayor of London Boris Johnson's 'Mini-Hollands' initiative. The winning bids were confirmed at London's City Hall this morning.
Five other boroughs had been announced on last September's shortlist for the funding, which aims to prioritise cycling in outer London town centres, including through rediesigning junctions using Dutch-style infrastructure.
The unsuccessful boroughs are Bexley, Ealing, Merton, Richmond upon Thames and Newham. The first four will share the remaining £10 millon or so of the £100 million put aside for the initiative, while Newham will get money from a separate source for works in Stratford town centre.
Today's announcement gives brief details of some features of the successful bids:
Enfield – Enfield Town centre will be completely redesigned, with segregated superhighways linking key destinations, three cycle hubs delivered across the Borough and new greenway routes introduced.
Kingston – A major cycle hub will be created and the plaza outside Kingston station will be transformed. New high-quality cycling routes will be introduced together with a Thames Riverside Boardway, a landmark project which could see a new cycle boardwalk delivered on the banks of the river.
Waltham Forest – A semi-segregated Superhighway route along Lea Bridge Road will be developed as well as a range of measures focused on improving cycling in residential areas and the creation of “Hackney-style” cycle-friendly low-traffic neighbourhoods.
Mr Johnson said: "I have been incredibly impressed with the standard of the mini-Holland entries and by the thirst among all the finalists to transform themselves into better places for people. It has been so hard to choose between them that I have decided that all shall have prizes.
“Areas once terra incognita for the bicycle will, over time, become every bit as cycle-friendly as their Dutch equivalents - places that suburbs and towns all over Britain will want to copy.”
Transport for London's director of surface transport, Leon Daniels, said: “From the moment we launched the Mini-Holland programme we have been blown away by the ambition and scale of the proposals from boroughs across London.
"The proposals from the eight finalists were all of exceptional quality and we look forward to working with them all to help make town centres across London more friendly and accessible to cyclists and pedestrians.”
Reacting to today's announcement, Ben Addy, senior communities officer at the susttainable transport charity, Sustrans, said: "The Mini Holland announcement is a real opportunity for the selected boroughs to fundamentally change their town centres by opening them up and making cycling the normal and best way to get around.
“I hope that the boroughs will seize upon this chance to engage closely with communities and user groups to ensure that local needs are met and ambitions realised.
“Mini Hollands will make neighbourhoods more liveable, school journeys safer and town centres more vibrant.”
Also revealed today were the first two Quietways announced last year. Those will run from Greenwich to Waterloo, and from Walthamstow to Bloomsbury. Six further routes "have been selected for accelerated delivery next year."
German Dector-Vega, director for Sustrans London, said: “We are extremely excited about these first two Quietways as they are both routes that people already use or where significant regeneration will take place.
"There is already great ambition and collaboration between local authorities, Sustrans and TfL to put forward designs that will provide a high quality experience for all cyclists.
"They will be fun to ride, will show off some attractive back streets and will greatly reduce barriers to cycling.
"New links, improved crossings and better access to the many attractions along each route will make local trips and journeys into central London easier.”
British Cycling policy advisor, Chris Boardman, added: "The boroughs that have won funding today have demonstrated that they understand what a vision of a true cycling nation looks like.
"Almost half of London households do not have a car, and around a quarter of journeys in inner London are now by bike, so it's logical that infrastructure and resource for this desirable form of transport reflects this.”
Here are links to download the bid documents for Enfield and Kingston.
Enfield also produced a video to accompany its bid:
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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58 comments
Why do I get an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach? Ah yes! A group of councils with completely different ideas are going to separately come up with a vision for cycling.
Oh God! It gets worse! They've got lots of public money to squander! I can see lots of fact-finding trips being required.
In a couple of years time, when all the money has been spent and everyone has patted each other on the back, the situation for cyclists will be worse than it is now.
Please let me be wrong!
Suddenly the penny drops... expense paid trips to Amsterdam!
Oh look, london again.. I go to london at least once a month for work and to be honest I see just as many idiots on bikes as car drivers and last week was exceptional.... Undertaking buses, bunny hopping kerbs to avoid red lights and my personal favorite..... A suited and booted commuter holding on to a pizza delivery scooter rack, must have given him a tip or purchased the pizza in the box. Idiots.
And the £100m is a complete insult, since they spend more than that on motorists...plus where has the supposed £1bn gone for london in general...oh wait.
In addition i bet you none of this will actually happen, all they do is talk, talk, talk.
The fact that these boroughs have to compete or some get it and some don't says it all.
Most of what they are doing looks to be complete rubbish anyway, kingston was fine outside the station before they started messing around with it for no good reason.
Enfield can just hand their money back now
BiXzISwCQAENS8p.jpg
Oh good grief. Please tell me that's the before picture.
There are so many things wrong with the picture, the most disturbing of which must be the approaching white Audi
Nope, it is after, here it is in bigger size https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiXzISwCQAENS8p.jpg
Bike-lane in the door-zone... check!
Buses turning across the bike-lane... check!
Lane also not mandatory.
Lane also not wide enough.
I had no idea that Enfield had such poor perspective. Used to live not far down the road in Finchley and that had proper vanishing points and foreshortening as far as I remember.
I am hopeful. I have read the Kingston report which recognises alot of the shortcomings of the past. Given the lead man on transport at the council is a road cyclist it might have a chance and the fact they are trying to link in with other boroughs is a good thing bringing further pressure for positive change.
The general view is that Kingston will balls it up again, brilliantly it see them replacing all the their latest changes outside the station where the transport planners were so retarded they forgot to add a dropped kerb in for the cycle lane.
Sadly we know this will be replaced by Car centric infrastructure driven by their transport engineers who don't get cycling. The money would best be spent on removing all car parking for council and police employees and giving them training and bikes, then things might genuinly change for the better.
A quick glance shows that Kindgston's "dutch roundabouts" are sadly doomed to fail, the corners aren't sharp enough to slow the traffic and I'm pretty certain the dutch never have duel carriageway approaches...
To be fair they are talking about "dutch style" as opposed to actual dutch roundabouts. Terms and conditions may apply, etc.
I was just looking at the plans for that, and I think it's quite promising. I know that roundabout well, so I'm quite interested to find it in there. I wouldn't say it's especially dangerous now, but because of it's large radius it's a good candidate to convert.
The only thing to wonder, is whether it's the right route to focus on. If you use that roundabout, you will probably also be using Shannon's corner, which is a busy fast junctions on the A3 with lots of "cyclist dismount" signs as you approach it.
That particular area of SW London is close to having some really good off road routes, but they just aren't finished or connected up properly. You can travel between Kingston, Raynes Park and Wimbledon using good quiet roads, but they are not continuous and they all cross the A3 in a less than ideal way.
Edit: for anyone curious, the roundabout proposed for dutch style conversion, is the fountain roundabout in the centre of New Malden (Burlington, Malden & Kingston Road).
I live in Amsterdam, actually there are dual carriage cycle lanes in places.
The main difference is that everyone in Holland uses a bike. Council employees, and Police included. England would be so much better for cycling if council employees were encouraged to use a bicycle once a week, they would see at first hand how disasterous their improvements really are.
This could be encouraged by not giving council employees so much fuel allowance that it is almost detrimental not to drive.
Gizmo wrote:
Not only that, one crept up behind and blasted his horn at me, repeatedly, at the lights. And again further up the road. On an empty Sunday morning road.
I wrote to Arriva and he was reportedly disciplined. They would have had it on the in-bus CCTV. Will be very pleased not to have to joust with that particular pr*** again.
I won't have a word said against wagon wheels.
Could members please use some other analogy, such as "cheese substitute". I find these comments quite upsetting.
Wagonwheels also contained tartrazine, a chemical that made kids behave as if they had ADHD.
I live right next to Kingston, and if anywhere would benefit from a make-over for cycling, this is the place. It has a horrendous one-way system, a busy pedestrian area, and the cycling provision is sidelined, poorly signposted, illogical and patchwork at the moment.
They have tried over the years, but it shows a lack of joined-up thinking. If you tried to cross the town from one side to the other as a newcomer, you'd get lost or end up cycling somewhere you shouldn't.
Looking forward to seeing the full plans now. I wish I could speak to the people designing this so I could show them a few points of contention myself!
dat photoshop
Hurrah for the Lea Bridge Road improvements.
Hopefully this will mean getting the buses out of the cycle lane. They only get in the way.
As someone in SW London, I'm glad it went to Kingston rather than Merton. Although I pass through the latter more, their attempts at cycling infrastructure are often so bad that they make the situation worse.
As the details emerge, I will take a close look at what Kingston has planned, the borough has a mix of good and some bad. Most of the segregated stuff that already exists around the town has the usual problem that it's full of pedestrians.
I hope they remember to take care of the basics as well, such as the terrible surface on the Portsmouth Road which follows the Thames. It should be a perfectly safe wide road, but I swear I've lost fillings on some parts of that from keeping in the cycle lane.
I remember once reading the wrapper of a Wagon Wheel, probably a jammy one knowing my preferences, and I first came across the phrase "chocolate flavour coating" and feeling pangs of utter contempt.
I get a similar feeling for phrases like "Dutch-style roundabout"
At least they're not suggesting "mini" is "fun-sized"...
It was better than no coating at all though, wasn't it?
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