A petition calling on the Mayor of London to ban lorries from the capital's streets during rush hour has received 2,500 signatures in the first 10 hours.
The London Cycling Campaign's (LCC) petition, which has received hundreds of impassioned comments from concerned cyclists, was launched one month after 26-year-old newlywed, Ying Tao, was crushed to death by a lorry while cycling at Bank junction in the City of London. Tao was the eighth cyclist to die on London's roads this year, seven of whom were killed in collisions with lorries.
From 1 September a ban of all lorries of more than 3.5 tonnes without side guards and mirrors comes into force in the capital but the LCC's Chief Executive, Ashok Sinha, says this is not enough and lorries should be banned from London's streets between 8-9.30am.
- Freight Transport Association agrees - government needs to incentivise safer lorry design
He said: “It is unacceptable that seven cyclists have lost their lives after being involved in collisions with lorries on London’s roads in the first half of 2015. 40% of cycling fatalities involving lorries occur in the morning rush hour. Almost all of these fatalities involve the construction and waste industry lorries that flood onto our roads at the same time thousands of people are cycling to work.
"The Safer Lorry scheme will do nothing to prevent this from happening, nor will it protect cyclists from lorries with restricted vision or unlicensed, untrained lorry drivers on London’s roads. Unless more is done, more people will lose their lives. We’re calling on the Mayor to end lorry danger now.”
Last week the Freight Transport Association's (FTA) Head of Urban Logistics, Christopher Snelling, said he believes a rush hour lorry ban is not the answer, arguing it will increase lorry numbers later, when there are more pedestrians on the roads, while increasing the use of smaller vehicles.
Snelling said: “Even a medium-sized lorry would have to be replaced with 10 vans – which means overall safety would not be improved, let alone the emissions and congestion consequences. It has to be remembered that we don’t choose to deliver at peak times on a whim – our customers need goods at the start of the working day.”
HGV deliveries must avoid rush hour for safety
The LCC's Rosie Downes said although the charity is supportive of the FTA's work to move delivery times outside of rush hour, an outright ban is the only way to prevent less scrupulous firms from operating in rush hour regardless of the risks. She said individual councils can play their role by moving delivery times outside of rush hour, too.
She said: "We believe regulation is needed to ensure that London’s most dangerous lorries – often the ones who are less proactive about reducing danger to vulnerable road users – aren’t on our roads at the busiest times.
"In addition to a rush hour lorry ban, it must be down to local authorities, construction clients and fleet operators to ensure they're reducing risk to vulnerable road users through measures like retiming deliveries to avoid London’s roads when they’re busy – not just between 8am and 9.30am - and improving vehicle safety," she said.
The lorry blind spot to the left of the driver's cab is implicated in 80% of cycling fatalities involving HGVs and the LCC is calling on the Mayor to ensure only direct vision lorries without that blind spot are used on projects that receive funding from the Mayor's offices.
A spokesman for the Mayor told the Evening Standard: "There are many difficulties and practicalities with imposing a rush hour ban in a major city like London. What we don’t want to see is heavy goods vehicle activity simply dispersed to other times of the day - HGVs flooding into town once the rush hour is over won’t deliver benefits for cyclists or pedestrians.
“In September, we will be banning lorries and construction vehicles without certain safety equipment from entering London at all - at any time of the day or week.”
Mayoral candidates: stop HGVs helping build Russian oligarchs' yuppie flats
Speaking to LondonLovesBusiness, Labour mayoral hopeful Christian Wolmar said: “I would support a ban for lorries between 8 and 9.30 in the morning. There are all these construction trucks building yuppie flats for Russian oligarchs.
“I think you could ban most lorries at these times. I’d particularly like to see more control over the construction industry lorries. It’s the construction lorries that have been causing all the danger.”
Conservative Mayoral hopeful, Zac Goldsmith, said he supports the lorry ban as well as the upcoming safer lorry standards in the capital. Goldsmith believes more freight needs to be shipped by river.
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44 comments
I can't help thinking that this is a sticking plaster approach. There needs to be infrastructure changes to make cities and towns safer. As @I Love My Bike says, it just shifts the problem, not solves it.
The problem is we have too many road users in a variety of transport modes all trying to use the same limited, shared infrastructure. We don't have the physical space or the money to solve all these issues so shifting them is the best we can do.
When it comes to the roads, there always needs to be a compromise between everyone and calling for a full ban on all HGVs is no more constructive than the other side calling for a total ban on cyclists.
Doesn't Paris already have this policy in place? Has it collapsed into chaos and the apocalypse of more expensive deliveries?
We still need to be careful and anticipate the worst what can happen. We have seen how banned drivers kill cyclist on lorries so a ban won't stop some companies. Not to mention that some of those lorries wouldn't pass MOT...
So, the same lorries will be rushing even more to complete their deliveries by 07:59 to beat the ban, and others at 09:31 because they didn't make it before 08:00 - great!
Could work though, if 'safest' lorries were exempt from the ban.
Its not just London, though, is it? We are constantly being told (disclaimer: not constantly) about how British cities are small and old and their roads are too narrow for cycle lanes, so how come we allow articulated lorries towing 40 foot trailers to come through _any_ of them?
Distribution centre at the edge of the city, then smaller (electric, or other low emission) to actually move stuff into the city centre.
Maybe a special dispensation for construction vehicles, for a specific site and for a limited time and only if they have all the blind spot cancelling gubbins that's being talked about elsewhere.
Seriously, if their blind spots are so all-pervasive that the driver cannot see what is around their cab, then they should be kept as far away from pedestrians and vulnerable road users as possible.
It is exactly how the big delivery operators like TNT, UPS, DHL now operate and have done for a while. For example in Birmingham TNT closed a city centre office and moved to a large centre on the middle ring road.
Thats why we cant have lanes, because space is needed for Buses (which are the same size as the lorries).
Its a nice idea but there are a lot of problems with this, how do you define when its needed? your essentially condemning some towns/cities to be at risk and only protecting some.
When i worked in Aberdeen for a few weeks i walked down the main street in the early morning, there were 2 small Sainsburys which got delivered too by 1 wagon each (that i saw), it must have delivered 30-40 trolleys to each store. That would probably require upto 10 transit van trips per store, so maybe 15-20 vehicles driving for just one morning delivery. Now multiply that for the fact there are 2 other supermarket chains on that street, plus a load of other shops, and the other deliveries that happen throughout the day... an easy way to kill the high-street through traffic alone (never mind the added cost thats got to be made back) and drive out-of-town shopping, reducing one of the key drives that could get people cycling.
I agree they need to be kept away from people, but they are an important part of how our society works, and a smart solution needs to be found.
Timings and routing should be set by authorities in my eyes, find the most appropriate routes into/through a town/city from a major trunk road and define that as the route for ALL goods traffic. Where diversion off this are required (shop in other area) it must be processed and a route defined. Fines for regular deliveries that are off approved routes. For one-off deliveries vehicle sizes can be restricted or require additional co-drivers.
Given the prevalence for GPS these days it would be very easy to set-up and run, and could allow road design to be improved on higher risk routes (so cycle lanes required if road to be used by 10t or above vehicles, otherwise the lorries have to go another way).
Great points. I imagine it all comes down to the cheapness of 1 40ft artic driver.
This is excellent news. If they can afford to replace one lorry and one driver with 10 vans and 10 drivers, they can sure-as-fuck afford to equip their lorries with additional mirrors, a co-driver for spotting, sensors and side/rear-mounted cameras.
But of course this won't happen because they'll bleat that they can't afford it. Double-standard pricks are full of shit.
Clearly he was talking from a volume and weight perspective. Cost would need to be picked up by the client. Cant imagine most people would tick the option 'charge me 10x cost to deliver using smaller vehicle' next time they get a washing machine or large building load delivered.
I wonder how many cyclists would vote with their feet if say Tesco adopted use of safer small vehicles as policy (hundreds of small vans rather than a few articulated lorries), given the hatred of Tesco by many.
Not sure what your point is.
I hate Tesco because they are a pretty crap supermarket - more a chain of very overpriced 'convenience stores' with astonishingly slow service. (Usual experience, go in, get some things off the shelf, notice there's an enormous queue and only one person serving...put things back on shelf and go find a Sainsbury's or Costcutter or Asda instead, where it will likely be cheaper and I might actually get served before dying of old age).
I don't know about the details of deliveries, or why we now have all these large lorries on the roads. I wouldn't blame it all on the freight industry itself, it clearly is a complex problem, but that doesn't mean everyone should just give up and accept the deaths.
One thing, amongst many, that I don't get is why there seem to be so many large lorries trying to negotiate narrow roads and tight junctions that they can't get through without driving over the pavement. Surely they should be confined to specific routes? More could be done to keep cyclists and lorries apart.
My point was, we (the public) want low costs, so shops work out ways to make themselves cheaper by economies of scale, i.e. bigger lorries. Would shops be more inclined to move to or request from suppliers safer lorries if they could expect 'public support' in extra footfall. At the moment they are more likely to lose custom by improving safety (increasing cost) and are only doing so as mandated by law.
Im saying there is an opportunity to move to safer lorries sooner by getting shops/brands to see it as a marketing benefit. Lets face it, getting Waitrose or Sainsburys to buy 5 or 10 safer lorries for use in city centres would barely register in their profits and could give a major publicity boost.
I would ask why the HSE are not involved as the design of these Lorries are simply dangerous and killers.
Of course this video helps all cyclists to show how much these killers are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1aSvoIpVss
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