Quicker By Cycle

I don't get out as much as I would like with the day job, but this week I had a meeting on a site 5 miles away from my office and naturally I cycled.

I say "naturally" because I completely ditched using my own car for work about 3 years ago when parking charges were brought in (£300 a year which is better used as a bike fund). I now use my bike for most of my site visits and meetings, although sometimes the bus if the weather is really bad (and the train for meetings in the centre of London). 

The journey was about 25 minutes and with the exception of a couple of places, it was on some very quiet streets although many do turn into rat-runs at peak times; I'll come back to that in a bit. The point is that the journey time was very reliable. 

If I made the same journey by bus (at the same time of day, about 1.30pm)  it would take 2 buses and be about 35 minutes and that assumes that the interchange is smooth; or one bus and a bit of a walk (about the same journey time). By car, it would be about 20 minutes, although add 5 minutes for the walk from the office to the staff car park. The journey time by bus or car is not reliable because many of the roads on the (driving) route suffer from congestion and at peak times, the uncertainty of travel times increases. For an interesting look at comparative cycle vs car travel times, have a look at this blog post by Mark Treasure.

Anyway, what is natural mode of transport for me is unusual in Outer London where the cycle mode share is less than the London average of 2% (probably around half that where I live) and where car ownership is high (although highly variable across wards) and that remains the challenge where the debate often goes as far as saying nobody cycles, so why invest the funding in enabling it? This is why historically, investment for cycling has remained low for decades with all but isolate dedicated facilities and paint on main roads.

Back to the my journey. The route I mainly took was mainly on a long-established locally signed route between which has the advantage of using a park path which is shared, but lit and always open. This cuts out some pretty awful main roads and gives the time advantage. The route (with some tweaks) is pencilled in as one of the Mayor of London's Quietways (currently unfunded) and this presents big issues for the future which appears to be the case where the routes of being built.

The main problem is that we are still talking about "cycle routes" and that means for any given end-to-end route, it will only ever be as good as its worst section or junction. My route crossed and ran along some busy roads. Crossings should be easy if they pass between side roads, then filter out other traffic crossing between those side roads. Where a route zig-zags between side roads via a busy road, then we need protection on that busy road; this is where I think just looking at routes is failing us - if we need to work on a main road for a short section, then why not the whole of the main road?

Crossing primary streets is straight-forward.

For Central London, the Quietways are meant to be part of a bigger grid picture, but in Outer London they seem to be arranged to connect areas to town centres. This does make sense in terms of trips to those town centres being made in their own right or as journey stages and people are not going to commute into the centre from the edge (unless they are really committed). I think the problem I am seeing is one of funding and ideas being spread to thin and we need a different tack.

I have been using the Cyclenation/ Cambridge Cycling Campaign "Making Space for Cycling" website and guide recently as a reference point in trying to explain the concepts of how we should be looking at out road network; that is, making decisions on what each street is for at a network level which then sets the treatment of each street going forward. The generality is that we are considering 5 types of street (please read the document for a really detailed explanation on wider principles) - there is consideration of off-road leisure routes, but I am more interested in urban cycling here;

Major roads between urban areas
There are basically fast and busy dual carriageways or motorways. In Outer London, these will be the radial roads such as the A12, A13, M11, A10, A1 ,M1, A40, A3, A2 and so on; or roads like the A406 North Circular. Many of these roads have no frontage access and limited junction access. 

For cycling, these could be fast routes and so parallel provision could be dividends, although walk distances mean they would be less useful walking. Where is gets more complicated is where some of the 'A' roads have people living on them, shops and side roads. In this condition, we need protection for walking and cycling, including regular, convenient and safe crossing points.

Primary Streets
These are generally A roads (sometimes B roads) which carry lots of motor traffic and provide direct links between places. They will normally have lots of frontage use and direct access and may or may not be dual carriageways (although single carriageways will predominate). For Outer London, these roads could be some of the big radial roads, but a bit further in. I think speed limits will be down to 30mph as well. 

Protection on Main Streets.

An example could be the A118 which connects with the A12/A127 in the east and the A11/A12 in the west taking in towns such as Romford, Ilford and Stratford. Again, protection and good crossings will be the order of the day. With the A118 example, we only have Stratford High Street doing anything meaningful. Many of these streets are "High Streets" and in the UK we really cannot decide what they are for - shopping or stuffing traffic through.

Secondary Streets
These might still carry high levels of traffic, but might also be quieter off peak. They will likely carry bus routes and have local shops. As with Primary Streets, we need to provide protection for walking and cycling, but these places can often lack highway width (boundary to boundary) for decent protection. This class will be very difficult to deal with and although they often try to be Primary Streets, I think many should be reworked to become local streets.

Local Streets
These are where people live, where kids should be able to play outside and might have the corner shop. Local streets should not be used to convey traffic between areas, should not be used by buses (unless small vehicles are being used on less frequent services) and the speed limit should be 20mph.

Short Links
These are those little routes which are longer than point closures, but are not end-to-end routes in their own right.

Short links - drivers go the long way round.

These are concepts which I will be returning to again and again, but what does this have to do with my 25 minute journey and the route I took? The first thing is that rather than looking at a whole route, I think effort is better spent looking at neighbourhoods around the main destination and building change from there. This brings focus and means that change in one area can be used so sell the idea to the next area; plus, this can help reconnect those neighbourhoods to the town centres for walking as well which can be sold to town centre shops. 

The thing to do is to get a map of the area and to colour code the street according to the 5 classifications above (literally print out the area and get highlighter pens out). What you'll probably find is that there are local streets which have too many through routes for motors and these need to be dealt with through a mixture of closures to motors, one-way streets (for motors) and prohibited turns (so-called "modal filtering"). 

A modal filter splitting two areas into traffic cells. Access for motors
is allowed in each motor cell, but people can't drive between them.

The aim is to break an area down into "traffic cells" which people can access with cars, refuse trucks and deliveries, but they can't use the streets to "beat" primary and secondary streets. The principle here is that people cannot drive between traffic cells. To play with the filters, one can use stickers on the coloured map to try different arrangements (and it can be a headache as an action in one place causes a problem elsewhere). This is something I have been doing quite a bit recently and it allows for rapid prototyping of ideas before going to the time and effort of then producing something professional-looking.

With the route I took in the week, this approach means that as well as creating the "route" the areas around the route will get treated along the way which will make for quiet neighbourhoods and feed the route itself. It also means that one has to confront street uses and the difficult issues on an area by area basis. Starting at the town centre end of a route allows refinement further on and something people can go and see. I have a particular issue on the route I took where I would have classified one street as "secondary" as it connects two other areas. 

The initial classification on this basis showed that not only there were primary streets which motors could be sent on (yes with a distance and time penalty), it showed that the inevitable conclusion being that a future classification had to be to convert the street into a local street with a modal filter. In theory, as no bus traffic is involved it should be easy (at least from a technical point of view). Moving from the page, we can use experimental traffic orders and cheap physical treatments to test layouts in the real world. Reaching some people in terms of consultation is difficult, but trialing layouts for a few months would allow data and better informed views to be collected.

Cheap, temporary and reusable materials for experimental schemes.

I don't know if I have explained myself very well in this post, I'd be grateful for feedback, but the point is that playing with coloured pens and maps is not costly and it allows a street use policy for an area to be set which in turn becomes the focus for investment. While the nominal longer distance cycling route will be improved, we get more "bang for the buck" in civilising the wider area. Indeed, this is less about cycling and more about liveability (and in Outer London, using the word cycling is like a red rag to a bull to some people).

At least in London, the only people doing it on this kind of scale is Waltham Forest with its Mini-Holland project. Cheap filtering pays huge dividends and allows serious money to be spent on big roads. If each borough in Outer London started doing this in a meaningful way, it would really allow limited funding to be focused in making nicer places which felt safe to use and then investing where protection is really needed. Before we know, it will truly be quicker by cycle.