Campaigners urge politicians to stop dragging cyclists into “phoney culture wars” – after Tory mayoral candidate claims “virtue signalling” bike lanes are causing “havoc”

Yes because, as good egotists, they want to be able to say "everybody does it" to absolve themselves.

I love the obligatory bit where she leans over the baby in the pram - and grimaces.  The poor baby must have been terrified. 

I couldn't bear too! 

She's a typical Tory, lying through her teeth. It was Boris Johnson who closed all those police station. The Met's budget has been severely limited thanks to the Tory Government and it was Theresa May who cut police numbers by over 20,000 across the UK. Khan was forced to bring in the expansion of the ULEZ zone by Grant Shapps when he was Transport Minister. Shapps made it a requirement before he'd sign off the financial package to settle the debts TfL accrued due to the drop in ridership/income caused by COVID.

She talks about crime in London but ignores the fact that crime is an issue right across the UK, due in no small part to the failed policies of the Tory Government we've had for the last 14 years. And she ignores the fact that in terms of crime, London is actually one of the UK's better cities. Instead she blames Khan for the problems her party has caused.

This is the political legacy Johnson has left, that bare-faced lies are normalised in right wing politics.

Does she have any policies?
She just moans about Khan and still claims she'll scrap ulez in day1 despite that being unlawful.

Based on that pic (3 lanes in each direction, no cycle lane that I can see) with both sides of the road having empty pavements...

Maybe whenever/wherever she is campaigning she can also point to the usually empty pavements and also say "Why do we need so many pavements when they are always empty? The extra motor lane would help ease congestion."
And lets not forget the bus lanes that are also usually empty most of the time.

mitsky wrote:

Based on that pic (3 lanes in each direction, no cycle lane that I can see) with both sides of the road having empty pavements...

Can't get rid of the pavement there - see the houses?  That's a 6 lane residential street!

(I don't know where this is, just grabbed it from the article, but bonus points if someone has been hassled by the local council because their garden bike shed "was not in keeping").

chrisonabike wrote:

(I don't know where this is, just grabbed it from the article, but bonus points if someone has been hassled by the local council because their garden bike shed "was not in keeping").

It's the North Circular in Wembley I think.

brooksby wrote:

Susan Hall wrote:

“So, I am pro cycling, but equally we must look at everybody else that uses the streets. And this war on the motorists must stop.”

Does she seriously think that our urban environments have been planned out with the motorist at the bottom of the pile? 

But I have trained, passed a test, bought expensive equipment, have got insurance like a responsible adult and I PAY ROAD TAX?!

Also - why do you think we have built all these roads everywhere?

brooksby wrote:

Does she seriously think that our urban environments have been planned out with the motorist at the bottom of the pile?

Yes she does, and she's not quite as wrong as you think.
Our urban environments have been barely planned out with anyone in mind. I suggest that urban road layouts have more to do with machinery access for building the houses, than any usability after the fact.
If it was car focussed design, rather than the car being perceived as "most adaptable" to what's left and so normalised, services wouldn't be run under the carriageway which require being dug up every few years.

Don't mistake me, she's very wrong in her conclusions, but actual planning does not happen in how we build towns and cities

Hmm... I'm sure there's some truth to that.  But your account isn't quite the whole story either.  If we're talking long term - which we are with the built environment - places certainly have been organised for the greater benefit of motor traffic (over everyone else).  E.g. thinking Glasgow's flirtation with US-style urban freeways.  And on the small scale roads have been widened / lanes added / nice wide corners made at side-road entry points / traffic lights added / parking provided.  That is all definitely "for motor vehicles and their drivers' greater convenience" in my book!

As for "utilities under the carriageway" - well ... we certainly seem to have the worst of all worlds in the UK.  There seems to be a free-for-all for utilities getting fairly frequent access and then being allowed to get away with poor quality restoration. Presumably because councils don't have the manpower to properly check and/or the resources to take this to court where a bad job has been done.  Plus a long chain of sub-(sub) contractors?

I'd like to know more about e.g. the Dutch situation here.  Although it's not quite the utopia for urban design people sometimes think (including me until I learned more) there are several things which overall appear much more likely to give better results than in the UK.  For example I think they have a different system for scheduling renewal / improvements so that a larger area is done at once.  Pros and cons - that may mean you wait longer for an upgrade - and it's more disruptive when it happens.  However that seems to be more comprehensive e.g. not just repairing things but checking utilities and bringing everything up to the current standard.  In Edinburgh it's definitely "resurface the road, then put it back just how it was" (if you're lucky)!

They've also things like a national database of underground structures / utilities - not aware of any equivalent in the UK?

Dutch example - a nice video covering a bridge improvement - it wasn't perfect but they did maintain walking and cycling access even when they closed it for motor traffic - by building a whole new temporary bridge!

That's mostly not true, for the last 60 or 70 years at least in Europe we've been trying to copy by and large, i e. some places more than others but everyone at least to some degree, the american model of (sub)urbanization. And that was very much founded on and designed for the motor car. Read up on how American car, tyre and oil companies lobbied for and then were enabled to buy up and dismantle the public transport companies there to favour their business, and how all this combined with housebuilding for returning soldiers led after WWII to their well known model of urbanization. I don't see how the necessity to periodically dig up the roads contradicts this in any way, it's all growth and more growth.

Agreed.  And in one sense it didn't "just happen" either.  It's not just that people were consciously selling things they knew were harmful.  They were also getting politicians firmly under control and engaging in "black propaganda" - lobbying the politicians to class black as white and blame the victims e.g. for road deaths - the invention of "jaywalking".

As for suburbanization the US seems locked into a rather pernicious version of this.

Yes, quite. We should be very much aware how capitalism (cue Rich_cb...), to favour the underlying growth model and thus their profits, has steered us knowingly into our current predicaments.

If you understand French, there's this lecturer called J.-B. Fressoz who's researched the "politcal history of CO2":
https://youtu.be/5kL75gkRK9k?si=a-xhhc8GlM38HXbc