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news
Cyclists in London (image: Tomek Baginski on Unsplash)Campaigners urge politicians to stop dragging cyclists into “phoney culture wars” – after Tory mayoral candidate claims “virtue signalling” bike lanes are causing “havoc”
The London Cycling Campaign has urged the capital’s mayoral candidates to stop trying to make Londoners “fearful” of cycling and to avoid dragging people who ride bikes into “phoney culture wars” – just a few weeks after Conservative hopeful Susan Hall claimed “virtue signalling” cycle lanes were causing “havoc” and gridlock for motorists.
Launching its ‘London loves cycling’ campaign, which aims to encourage cyclists to celebrate the joys of travelling across the city by bike, ahead of the mayoral elections on 2 May, the London Cycling Campaign has claimed that cycling in the capital was now “mainstream”, with 1.26m weekday journeys now being cycled.
The group has also pointed out that this new mainstream status was aided by progressive cycling measures introduced by both Conservative mayor Boris Johnson and the current Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan, and that any attempts to end this “decade of progress” would be “unpopular and futile”.
🌈 Let’s make sure London’s next Mayor knows how much we all love cycling!
Share #LondonLovesCycling & tell your story, email the candidates by 2 May, and let's make our voices heard! >>> https://t.co/CP5JIYeM6S#LondonElections #LondonMayor pic.twitter.com/tCHLqDEYKE
— London Cycling Campaign (@London_Cycling) April 3, 2024
“Cycling is an everyday way of getting about London for so many people now,” LCC’s chief executive Tom Fyans said as he launched the new campaign, which will include a cycling ‘festival’ during the weekend before the May elections.
“So it’d be a short-sighted politician indeed to scrap schemes that have resulted in huge growth in this clean, heathy, and congestion-busting way to travel.
“We’re asking London’s mayoral candidates to help unlock the capital’s potential by making it truly safe, funding it appropriately, and rolling out more high-quality cycle routes, rather than try to make Londoners fearful of a simply joyous, healthy mode of transport.
“The blunt fearmongering is a bit like asking Londoners to fear ice cream, a night out or birdsong – and about as likely to work as that.”
Fyans’ reference to “blunt fearmongering” could be viewed as a thinly veiled swipe at the Conservative Party’s candidate Hall, who launched her campaign at the end of March by once again setting out her stall as the prospective mayor most likely to end the so-called “war on the motorist”.
Hall – whose 26-point deficit to Khan means she would require an unlikely turn of events to land the top job in the capital – said last month that she is “pro any form of transport” but questioned why “damn ridiculous” cycle lanes had been built when “we must remember there’s only two to three per cent of the population that are cyclists”.
“We must look at some of these cycle lanes that have been put in,” she said. “I’ll give you the example of Park Lane. It’s damn ridiculous, quite frankly.
“It was virtue signalling by this mayor [Sadiq Khan] because there’s a cycle lane that goes through the park right next door. The traffic then gets gridlocked. Fumes all over the place.
“A successful city is a moving city. When you’ve put some of these cycle lanes in that cause nothing but havoc, when you put cycle lanes in because you’re virtue signalling, that is unacceptable.
“The other thing that nobody seems to bring up, which is so important when we have gridlocked streets, is how do we expect our emergency services to get through? It is very important that ambulances, fire engines, police can get through the streets as quickly as possible, as well as the rest of us.
“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.”
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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21 comments
"Virtue signalling" is such a funny insult to me.
"This person is doing something good just to get praise for being good" like, so? At least they are doing the right thing, even if its for the wrong reason. Would you rather they didn't do the right thing?
Yes because, as good egotists, they want to be able to say "everybody does it" to absolve themselves.
She's a dinosaur. I applaud LCC for putting a positive viewpoint across. Would also be good to see LCC and others encouraging people to respect the different types of pedestrian crossings especially when people are using them. When you cycle from Fulham along the river to central London it is frustrating to see so many people on bikes making it dangerous for people to step onto or use a crossing. Crossings are infrastructure designed to make it safe for pedestrians to cross. Every time I cycle in London some people on bikes are being wankers. Probably the same if / when they drive. This type of behaviour is prominent in London and is feeding people like Hall with free material. Needs to stop.
Watch and wince:
https://fb.watch/rdwGXvyhV0/
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.
Susan Hall, the dumbest of the dumb*. Her promo video for mayor included a section showing how dangerous London is, using a clip from New York.
*Well, perhaps I'm being generous there, but in a crowded field, she's certainly with the leading pack.
"It is very important that ambulances, fire engines, police can get through the streets as quickly as possible, as well as the rest of us."
It is not paramount that "the rest of us" can get through as quickly as possible. Safety comes first before speed. Just need to get where we are going in a reasonable time, and alive, rather than as a casualty in the nearest A&E department.
Susan Hall might get a few votes by stirring up culture wars, but it is less likely that she'll get them from any of her actual policies. I doubt the other candidates are particularly worried.
Does she have any policies?
She just moans about Khan and still claims she'll scrap ulez in day1 despite that being unlawful.
Kinda pointless to comment because those statements pure bingo. Plus I'm slightly suspicious it's mostly performative - although allowing for the possibility she / her friends are just angry people who have simply never thought in that direction. But...
[ Traffic is NOT the lifeblood of the city ]
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.
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").
It's the North Circular in Wembley I think.
Does she seriously think that our urban environments have been planned out with the motorist at the bottom of the pile?
But then, that's the point the LCC are making… The current crop of Conservatives would wage a culture war against kittens and fluffy little bunnies if they thought that it would garner them more votes, I suspect.
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?
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