Morning:
8°c
Still miles to go to open up the city
Andrew Neather14 Dec 2007
The £50 million Lottery award to Sustrans is good news for London cyclists. It will make some journeys easier for cyclists in places such as Islington and Bermondsey.
But welcome as the money is, it also highlights how far we have to go in opening up the city to bikes.
Surveys suggest that about a quarter of Londoners would cycle if it were easier. As a cycling commuter, I'm a bit inured to the dangers but I've had a taste of what it must feel like for a novice while taking my young children to school by bike for the last couple of days.
While I have cycled on the road, toddler in child seat on the back, my four- and six-year-olds have pedalled along the pavement next to me - and it has been nerve-racking trying to watch them as I thread through school-run traffic and covering junctions. I'm afraid the Sustrans cash won't help me, or most London cyclists, with the same dilemma.
The trouble is there are hundreds of potential cycle routes in our city. Some are mapped out in the London cycle network and where they exist they're great, on quieter backstreets. In several years of cycling, I have never had any scary moments on those routes.
What we need now is for that network to be expanded, as planned in the 900km London Cycle Network Plus. But as the Standard reported recently, progress is being stalled by foot-dragging by councils.
Where boroughs are imaginative, they can do so much more. Hackney recently won a London Cycling Campaign award for its "permeability" programme - small changes to streets, such as putting a cycle contra-flow lane in a one-way street, or even just lowering the kerb where a route out of a park meets the road. These aren't big or expensive projects but if they were multiplied across the city, it would transform the ease and safety of cycling.
Instead, Lambeth council is planning to blow around £1million on a scheme designed to speed up traffic at the worst junction on my children's route to school in Herne Hill (and shearing the corner off Brockwell Park). Until we change those sort of priorities, London will remain a city for drivers.
