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Mayor Boris invited to saddle up and experience the dangers of Kings Cross roads for himself

Blackfriars and Kings Cross are symptoms of a wider problem says Green Pary's Jenny Jones...

Boris Johnson should get on his bike and experience the dangers cyclists are exposed to on the roads around Kings Cross for himself. That's the message from Green Party Mayoral Candidate, Jenny Jones following the death of a young woman cyclist who was killed in a collision with a lorry outside the London station last week.

Blogging under her road.cc username Greenjennyjones, Ms Jones also calls on the Mayor to implement in full the measures contained in 2008 Transport for London (TfL) report into the roads around Kings Cross which advised re-allocating carriageway space to the footpath, creating more pedestrian crossings and introducing traffic calming measures – that report says Ms Jones has largely been ignored as has the 2008 TfL report in to traffic on London's bridges – which was commissioned following the death of cyclist Val McCreery on Blackfriars Bridge.

As well as proposing 20mph speed limits on all London bridges that report also put forward plans for a re-designed T-junction at the northern end of the bridge of the type favoured by the LCC but rejected by TfL itself when it came to re-designing the road layout for the redevelopment of the area. TfL has not moved to implement in full the findings of either the Blackfriars or Kings Cross studies.

Ms Jones contends that despite the talk of a cycling revolution in London the impetus behind Mayor Johnson's transport plans is still to put the free flow of motorised traffic first ahead of the needs of other road users and pedestrians and until that changes problems such as the "bodged redesign of Blackfriars Bridge" will continue and indeed be replicated across London.

You can read Greenjennyjones's blog here

road.cc's founder and first editor, nowadays to be found riding a spreadsheet. Tony's journey in cycling media started in 1997 as production editor and then deputy editor of Total Bike, acting editor of Total Mountain Bike and then seven years as editor of Cycling Plus. He launched his first cycling website - the Cycling Plus Forum at the turn of the century. In 2006 he left C+ to head up the launch team for Bike Radar which he edited until 2008, when he co-launched the multi-award winning road.cc - finally handing on the reins in 2021 to Jack Sexty. His favourite ride is his ‘commute’ - which he does most days inc weekends and he’s been cycle-commuting since 1994. His favourite bikes are titanium and have disc brakes, though he'd like to own a carbon bike one day.

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Paul M | 13 years ago
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I suspect Boris is well familiar with the city's gyratories, because he does actually cycle around a lot - unlike Posh Dave, who only ever did it for show, with his briefcase following in an official car.

So it does beg the question - why doesn't Boris actually do womthing about London streets? From what I can gather he is not a hardened vehicular cyclist (far from it - apparently he is amazingly slow) who is content with the road conditions amnd doesn't wannt his freedom to zoom curtailed. He might be a real pertol head at heart but I doubt it.

My theory is that all politicians feel inadequate in the presence of "experts". They're afraid to display their ignorance (of engineering, or modelling, or whatever arcane topic the "expert" is expert in) so they just nod their heads and agree to whatever bullsh*t the experts spout to them.

"Yes Minister" lives on!

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thereverent | 13 years ago
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I think Boris Johnson, Peter Hendy (TfL Commissioner) and Leon Daniels (Managing Director, Surface Transport) should all take a cycle tour of some of Londons gyratorys (Parlament Square, Vauxhall, Elephant and Castle, Hyde Park Corner, Aldgate, etc). Then they can go back to the drawingboard on how to redesign the roads on London.

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zanf | 13 years ago
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I've said this a couple of times to people over the last few days:

It seems that TfL's motivation to keep car traffic flowing, at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists, is because they are a (congestion charge) revenue stream and the situation will remain the same until either people quit driving en mass or TfL are deposed and disposed of.

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Sven Ellis replied to zanf | 13 years ago
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@ Zanf:
Not a particularly compelling argument vis-a-vis King's X, as all the Euston/Pentonville Rd traffic is CC-free. Only the Gray's Inn Rd side is in the charge area.

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