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news
Big Ben © Simon MacMichaelTransport Minister draws flak after cycling inquiry
Transport Minister Robert Goodwill MP has drawn criticism from a number of campaigners following comments made to the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group as part of its inquiry into the Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy (CWIS).
The draft CWIS was slammed by campaigners when it was published in March, with British Cycling’s Chris Boardman saying it was “not worth the paper it’s written on” without funding.
Yesterday (Monday May 24) saw Goodwill questioned about the proposals, along with a number of others, including Boardman, representatives of cycling organisations and a number of transport experts.
One of Goodwill’s more eyecatching comments was that the perception of fear of cycling in places like London could be blamed on media coverage of cycling fatalities.
However, it was his response to a question about key performance indicators (KPIs) on diversity that drew most ire on social media.
Robert Goodwill says he will consider KPIs but we need to know why women don't want to cycle to work. His wife says a helmet spoils her hair
— APPCG (@allpartycycling) May 23, 2016
Mark Treasure, chair of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, pondered whether this might also be a major reason why so few men cycled to work.
Also bear in mind here that >96% of men don’t cycle to work. Must be worried about their hair, or something https://t.co/DXaWffDFC9
— Mark Treasure (@AsEasyAsRiding) May 23, 2016
Another claim was that funding per cyclist was in a healthy state in the UK. Although he also said that more was always wanted.
Robert Goodwill says there will never be enough money for cycling. He says that spending has tripled to £7 per head
— APPCG (@allpartycycling) May 23, 2016
The sustainable transport charity Sustrans calculates the current level of spend to be £1.35 per person per year. It says that £17.35 per person per year will have to be spent over the next 10 years if the government is to meet its target of doubling the levels of cycling over the next decade.
Goodwill also said Britain was ‘on a par’ with other European countries when it came to cycling. When asked by the panel which ones, he said he would get back to them.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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Assumptions? How do you know that the occupants are capable of walking three miles (45 minutes at a decent pace) without arriving at their destination hot and sweaty?
How do you know what equipment, heavy shopping etc is in the boot therefore making a 3 mile walk utterly impractical?
How do you know what the weather conditions might be on the day that someone chooses to drive rather than walk 3 miles?
You really are clutching at straws now. You are suggesting a large proportion of Londoners are disabled to a point where they can't walk a couple of miles? Really?
I carry my shopping in a rucksack, incidentally. Not everyone can do that, of course, but I just don't see why I should have to subsidise those who could but choose not to. And I know the weather isn't that bad most of the time because I live here myself and am well aware of when I get rained on and when I don't (duh!).
A recent example of an unncessary car journey - someone I know was house-hunting. The house to be looked at was less than 100 yards from the estate agency. It was visible from the agency doorway, just across the main road. Estate agent insisted on driving, my friend declined the offer of a lift and walked there in about 2 minutes and then waited outside for 5 minutes or so for the estate agent to find a parking place further up the road and walk back again.
If something is excessively subsidised people will choose to use it when it would be more efficient not to. Its not evil behaviour, its just human nature to respond to incentives. Not all subsidies are unjustifiable, of course not, but some of them have negative effects. The way we currently subsidise private motorised transport is one of them.
I can walk for 20 miles if I have to or want to but during the course of an average day there may be several reasons why I would rather take the bus or drive half a mile rather than cycle or walk. And that choice is quite frankly. none of your business.
Why you seem to think that you can sit on your high horse with your rucksack and sweaty back deciding whether or not the modes of journey of complete strangers is appropriate .... wow, just wow.
Sure. So long as I can come to the street outside your home and fly up and down it with a fucking helicopter at roof level whenever I want to.
It takes a special kind of arrogance to think public space is everyones right to do with as they wish. It's not, these are choices that any community can change democratically if they want to, and there are more cities rolling back universal car access every year.
Whereas you espousing 'if it feels good, do it' as a national travel strategy makes perfect sense.
That makes a lot of sense to me. It has (from my selfish perspective) benefits to me as someone that enjoys cycling, and benefits to everyone else (energy efficiency blah, etc).
Except when it becomes a pattern of indoctrinating people to make bus journeys which could be walked in ten minutes.
Maastricht.
And of course you missed the point about electric bikes didn't you? Actually no, you didn't miss it, I think you're just a contrarian twat.
Cities clogged with self driving cars, until the roads are so congested they just live in them. I think 2000AD got there about 35 years ago. As a prediction of urban transport, it's utter bollocks, and not what much of the autoindustry itself is betting on.
Seriously?
In my office in Blackfriars, people commute from Ealing, Bexley, Sutton, Wimbledon, Blackheath, Muswell Hill, St Albans, Watford, Eltham and Snaresbrook. One person cycles, me. One uses a motorcycle. One drives to work in a Prius. Everyone else uses public transport.
.... and you believe comparing this not unusual solution to a city like Maastrict which is the size of a poxy village compared to Greater London is reasonable?
Behave.
Ok, since Bogota and Seville didn't make an impression, how about Osaka, Japan. Metro area: 19 million. Fairly hilly outskirts. Cycling modal share has been estimated at 25%.
Don't expect an answer, he skips the difficult ones, or talks about something unrelated. Osaka will have special weather|culture|training|geography (delete as applicable).
Any country or city that cycles is a special case. Any country or city that doesn't is just a normal human reaction. Normal people don't like bikes, 98% of people immediately frown when they sit on a bike. That's why cycling only has a modal share of 2% in the UK, no other factors involved.
Anywhere that you would want to get to in Osaka is flat, as you say only the outskirts have some moderate hills.
Sustainability problems are wicked and the solutions are not often transferable. Poverty is poverty but the solution to child poverty in Nairobi will not have anything to do with the solution of child poverty in Nottingham. Transport issues are no different. What works in one place is no guarantee that it will work elsewhere.
When designing a sustainable transport solution you need to think about the topography and cultural expectations of the people in a specific location and not lazily assume that a solution that worked in a village with 40 people in the middle of nowhere will work in a megapolis with 13 million people and an area of 700 square miles.
Design should be participatory. You start with the real people that you are designing for, find out their needs and desires and then implement solutions that they are likely to adopt. For Londoners, given their relatively long commutes, the awful weather, the need to be presentable, the narrow streets and the hilly topography, that means better cleaner more efficient public transport. The money "invested" in CSHs are a complete waste, IMO. It should have been spent on cleaner buses and more crossrail type projects.
Pompously deciding in advance that the answer everywhere is more cycling and then berating people from your high horse, wearing your sweaty rucksack, for "not getting the message" might feel good but does nothing to tackle the genuinely important sustainability issues of our great city.
That's your opinion. I think It's misguided. Borrowing technological solutions to common problems is how farming and later civilization developed.
By the way, only the (pop. 2.5M) center of Osaka seems fairly flat. I've only been as far as Kyoto, which is in the same metro area and farily hilly but not unbearably so. So it turns out I was understating things when I say Osaka is hilly. It's downright mountainous. A quick glance in Strava in Kobe or Higashiosaka throws out a segments upon segments that read 1.9km at 11% or 1.5km at 10% quite near the center of those towns. The road from the airport to Kobe (pop. 1.5M) includes a 11.3km section at 7.5%. Now, that's probably not the busiest bike-commuting street within that metro area, but it is within a metro area that is twice as populous and twice as dense as Greater London. So you can get a sense of how much hillier whatever your definition of London could possibly be than Osaka. That you wouldn't want to cycle as much in "hilly" London doesn't mean many people can be persuaded to do so, without bullying. Particularly as e-bikes become a thing.
Yeah, public transport is generally awesome in Japan. But bikes help out. Streets are even narrower, it's far hillier, and the weather isn't much nicer. And Japanese people are generally immaculately presented. Yet modal shares are far higher across the board. So there's some room to grow, IMHO, "topography" notwithstanding.
Funny that you should mention farming, especially as techniques that may work very well in one location won’t work at all in other locations with different climate, soil type and pests.
To take an extreme example, do you seriously think you can take a transport solution from Stockholm to San Diego and expect it to work any time soon? Of course not, a different country, different expectations, a different historical relationship to the car, different attitudes to public transport, differing climate, levels of crime, topography etc etc etc … never mind cycling.
This kind of behaviourist thinking, if we the people in charge do thing A then people will do thing B … is so out of date and thoroughly discredited. The truth is that it is impossible to change culture, only possible to influence culture and that huge cultural changes require millions to be spent and can take generations before you see results.
Think of examples like smoking, drink driving, litter, not wearing a seatbelt … campaigns have run for decades, the argument for not doing any of the above has been won comprehensively, in some cases people can go to prison or pay hefty fines for non-compliance and yet people still do all of the above.
The problem with sustainable transport in cities is that we do not have the luxury of generations to wait for cultural change. Air pollution in London is reaching dangerous levels virtually every day. The congestion charge has not reduced car journeys, it has pushed them to the outskirts where there is now an epidemic of childhood respiratory problems.
I have two young children and a third child on the way. I am taking my family (regretfully) out of London to move to West Sussex primarily because of the pollution issue. That means that I won’t be cycling any more to work. Maybe a Boris Bike from Victoria to Blackfriars after a long frustrating train ride without a seat, until I eventually give up and buy a low emissions, congestion charge-free Prius or similar and drive ….
To channel Bill Clinton, it’s the emissions stupid! I really don’t care if there is gridlock everywhere and people stuck in their alu boxes taking two hours to do a journey that would take 20 mins on a bike … that is their problem, unless they are belching toxic fumes into the atmosphere while they do so. Then that becomes my problem.
The solution to that problem isn’t to try to force people to do what they blatantly don’t want to do i.e. get out of their cars and onto bicycles. The solution is to make it easier for people to do what they want to do while minimising damage to the environment.
This is why this cycling, cycling, cycling agenda in London (the only place I am talking about as it is where I live) is so misplaced and ridiculous. These cycling initiatives are not persuading people to abandon their cars in favour of cycling. People are abandoning public transport in favour of cycling. That is a good thing in terms of increased fitness etc … but people abandoning buses, tubes and national rail because they are cramped, uncomfortable, unreliable, inconvenient and far too fucking expensive does not take a single vehicle off the road. It does sweet fuck all about emissions.
So celebrating because 20 people per minute are using cycle lanes when car ownership has increased by 600,000 in a year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35312562 is pissing in the wind.
Why anyone would look at current stats: Cycling 2% modal share, 1% of all distances travelled, the average distance cycled by cyclists a paltry 58 miles in one year, 65% have not ridden a bike in the last year … and think that getting more people cycling is going to provide an answer to urban pollution is beyond me?
A 500% increase would be a massive achievement and not even put a dent in the problem of emissions.
I ordered a bag from an online UK retailer, an expensive one for my wife’s birthday. The bag travelled from the atelier to a depot in Paris. Then on to Brussels by road. Before boarding a plane to Gatwick. Then on to Heathrow by road. Then to Docklands before being put on a van to deliver to my office where it was gift wrapped and placed in my pannier for the cycle home.
Meanwhile, holier-than-thou Earth Mother above thinks she is saving the planet because she walks/cycles two miles to the shops and carries her goods home in a sweaty rucksack … ignoring all the vehicle emissions that put the product in the shops. Unless she is the motoring equivalent of a vegan … refuses to buy or own anything that required fossil fuels in its manufacture or transportation … her decision to walk / cycle for transport is an insignificant speck compared to the damage she does to the environment by existing and being a consumer in an industrially developed society creating emissions with every purchase and every message posted to road.cc.
Yes, it pisses me off that the thing that will actually make the most difference, huge financial incentives for businesses and individuals using the cleanest possible transport solutions and huge financial penalties for people still using out of date fuel combustion technology, is written off by environmental campaigners because they simply don’t like the idea of car usage and over-romanticise the benefits of cycling. It is bullshit. Cycling is a speck that has little relevance as a sustainable urban transport method for the very young and the over 50s and has zero relevance in terms of the transport of goods and maintenance of essential services that keep a city and its economy operational.
Investment in cleaner, efficient, comfortable, safe public transport that people will actually want to use is what is required and for those who need to / choose to drive, huge tax breaks for businesses and individuals to make the case for not choosing diesel or high fuel emissions cars a no-brainer.
I've worked in both those cities and quite a few more. Cities are much more alike than they are different.
But a moment ago you were happy to wait for a driverless car revolution. Something that will take at least two or three decades to both mature the technology and sell through.
It's transport stupid. Car dominated cities don't work.
Who exactly are you being a twat towards?
"how do the shops get supplied" is Daily Mail level stupid. Why should we invest in clean buses, because "how will the shops get supplied".
The answer is the same way they do in the Netherlands, by a lorry. It's about modal share and rebalancing a car dominated transport system towards a greater share of public transport and active travel. Nothing excludes the use of motor vehicles where they are necessary.
Well there's another big fallacy right there. Suggesting that it's an either/or issues. Cycling infrastructure costs pennies, for TfL it's still barely one percent of the budget. You could drop all of it into the bus network, traisn or trams it wouldn't make a fraction of the difference.
Furthermore it's mostly a capital cost. Once built the infrastructure costs almost nothing to maintain. Trains and buses have massive recurring costs.
You keep spending on cycling and you keep spending on public transport. Because they're both part of the solution.
I think I can say with some confidence that you are the only cyclists in the entire country that is arguring to remove money from the miniscule cycling budget, and reallocate it to subsidise and encourage private car purchases. I've placed emphasis on part of your statement. Have a collective slap from everyone else that cycles.
Well, that's 2 minutes of my life etc etc. The game's up, people. Bikes are second fiddle to motors on the road, to peds everywhere else, and they're shit as transport. Pack up, strap your bike to your car, and go home.
I'll leave it to the others who can still be arsed to toy with you to reply to that epistle to... fuck knows. It takes someone spectacularly silly/trolly who seems to hate cycling and belittles most aspects of it and yet bothers to register and converse on a site dedicated to road cycling.
Taking people off public transport and putting them on bikes makes the tube less uncomfortable and overcrowded in of itself.
I loved riding round Elephent & Castle before the re-design, but seeing kids on the new bike route rocked. And I know I wouldn't have brought a bike post-uni if I hadn't cycled to school alone, on a well-designed bike path that segrigated me from a fast A-road from 10 onwards
This is exactly the sort of romanticised bollocks I am talking about. Ah .. look at the little angels cycling learning how to travel sustainability ... feels good doesn't it? Yes it does. But ..
The reality is that it is a speck with zero benefit to the urban environment at the same time that 600,000 new cars are joining the road network every year. Car production is at a 7 year high, bus journeys are falling ...
But hey fuck that ... 10 more people more minute on a bike during rush hour ... woo hoo .. sustainable transport in the UK is really on the move ....
In ten years time we will still be in the same place ... dogmatic fools trying to bully the reluctant into cycling rather than bribing them with huge tax breaks to make sure that their next vehicle is an electric one ... a solution that might actually ... you know, work!
Here's a picture of London's motor traffic.
Here's an artists impression of what that would look like with electric vehicles.
Much better.
Meanwhile, car use in central London is falling year on year, and bicycle use is rising rapidly. But hey, fuck that, someone wants us to help pay for his new car with huge tax breaks, so he can live in the suburbs and drive it to Blackfrairs.
Basically, we've found this guy.
Absolutely! In Picture B there are no diesel particulates being belched into the air, ditto NO2, ditto CO2, ... fabulous!
That is a genuine leap forward for the air quality of everyone living and working in the city. Those drivers can sit there in there self driving, entertainment spaces / mobile offices going nowhere fast, watching the cyclists and pedestrians whizz by .... and maybe in a years time, 2 years, 5 years, the penny might drop that there are other, better, more efficient transport modes worth trying for shorter journeys ..... but at least for now, the damage being done to air quality in the city is insignificant.
It is the EMISSIONS stupid! ... and expecting to tackle that knotty problem by getting people out of cars onto bikes is arrogant eco-imperialist codswallop and it does not work. Listening to people like you makes me want to go joy riding in a diesel SUV just for spite.
Let's have this discussion next year, when oooh .... an extra 10 people per minute are using cycle lanes ... woo hoo ... while elsewhere another 600,000 particulate belching contraptions have been added to the road ....
You are looking the wrong way.
We don't have a serious low carbon electricity generation system, nor any sensible means of arriving at one quickly, so the CO2 is still going out. Agreed you've improved the air quality in the city - not done much for congestion, obesity, or the quality of life of whoever ends up saddled with the generation capacity. But hey, that won't be London, so who cares?
Only an idiot would look at that picture and think the only problem is emissions. The world is urbanising, and population densities are rising in almost every city. That isn't a trend compatible with mass car use. As before, cities are more alike than they are different, that's why everyone is rolling back the 1950's future.
Good. Best piss off to Australia and sit in their traffic. You'll love it, you can spend the entire day in your entertainment space. It's just like the Jetsons.
Deal. And then the year after that, and the year after that, and onwards until you eventually notice the effects of compound growth. That's unless any politicians are foolish enough to put the brakes on because they've drunk the driverless electric car coolaid.
Well there's anothe trick you've discovered. Keep talking about London, and then using national statistics.
Prviate car use is falling in London. Private car ownership is falling in London. It's almost as though London is the only part of the country with some semblance of the right approach. Which is the one part you're criticising.
Where has anyone said anything about bullying more people into cycling? The point being consistently made is that 2% or thereabouts modal share is low compared to similar cities and countries, and that surveys consistently show that more people would cycle if they deemed it safer. Do you want to argue that point? Do you want fewer people to cycle?
The argument then is that better infrastructure and safer roads are worth campaigning for. Do you want to argue that point? Do you want roads to be less safe for cyclists?
Nobody is saying that they want everyone to cycle. Quite a few people are saying that people drive ridiculously short journeys and there's not much wrong with that sort of behaviour being influenced out, in favour of more pleasant living environments. Do you want to argue that point? Do you think that the personal choice to drive half a mile from house to shop or through residential areas should be a significant factor in modern urban planning?
Nobody is arguing against us being addicted to cars and that people like buying and using them. Make that point as many times as you like.
You do love a false dichotomy and straw man but they're really fucking tedious.
And you're doing all this on a cycling site.
You seem to have a Daily Mail level of disdain for all things cycling, apart from you being on a bike. Do you hate yourself for enjoying riding a bike? Does posting on here and the flaming you get serve as your flagellation routine?
I've wondered about this. There are transport evangelists on this site, who cycle to work and think more cycling is A Good Thing, and there are the people who are just into the sport and wouldn't dream of cycling to work or to the shops...
I don't understand L Willo: they claim to cycle to work but don't appear to give a toss about improving the environment for cycling or spending money on it.
I don't think that they're a troll, they appear to believe what they say. But I'm not sure why they bother posting on a site like this, on every article about cycling spending or cycling safety or cycling infrastructure, just to argue about why it's all rubbish.
Most people are somewhere in the middle, I've been at various positions in that spectrum. Even amongst the sterotypical MAMIL, it's quite rare to find people that don't get its place as just transport. The funny thing about those middle aged men, is that an awful lot of them have children.
The one thing I'd always want to tell readers of this site, is that if you haven't got one simple practical bike in your n+1 stable of carbon fibre, you really should have. Read John Stevenson's recent bike build, and rediscover just how damn convenient and useful an everyday bike is.
Some people just need to be different. He won't be special if other people start cycling, or horror of horrors, "ordinary" people.
They might even be ordinary enough to be able to cycle six miles (just thrity minutes at a very Dutch 12 mph) without needing a shower afterwards.
I used farming as an example explicitly because it's a great example of how technology affects change in seemingly differing but fundamentally similar spaces. Mass farming methods are pretty much in use world wide. Funnily enough, Stockholm and San Diego were both recently at the forefront of cycling. Stockolm is tabling a reverse congestion charge for cycling, San Diego is proposing a San Diego - Tijuana bike lane. Cultural shifts do take time, of course, but so does the development of any other transport solution. Copenhagen increased it's modal share by about 25% in 25 years. That seems like a huge improvement to me.
But this has gone around and around. If local air pollution is your only concern, then go ahead and advocate your scheme. A bike news site might not be your clearest audience, but it's a wide tent. Pushing everyone to an all electric car system will cost dozens of billions, but it would surely help on that one issue.
But if you think obesity, the rising costs of health care, sedentarism, congestion and, climate change (as oldstrath said, your scheme is just shifting the CO2 emissions geographically) are also among the many pressing issues that need to be resolved by using a limited pool of resources as efficiently as possible; then you might want to give your position a rethink. Maybe a multi-front approach that takes walking, mass transport and cycling into account, however stupid you think it is to try to convince Londoners to cycle for transport, may contribute. It may even do so, much more efficiently.
Again, few here are against electric cars, or mass transport, or walking. We'd like to see cycling as part of that mix, as some (most) of us think it's a particularly beneficial part of the equation. I think most of us also understand that to an extent we may be overrating the benefits of our favorite way to get around. But it would also seem that almost every serious transport study finds cycling to be a useful part of any transport strategy. Again, for most people on most commutes, it won't surely won't be your ideal solution if you're planning on commuting into London from Worthing.
So I hope you at least understand why I think your approach is untried, problematic, inefficient, either prohibitively expensive or politically untenable, or both, and ultimately limited in both scope and reach. But I am completely supportive of strengthening emissions standards in motor vehicles as a part of any comprehensive transport strategy.
Guess we have to keep repeating this for you.
Amazing isn't it. You're office isn't representative of the whole of England. In much the same way that the people who cycle today are in no way representative of a cycling country.
There are lots of people who don't live that far from their work.
Many of those that live further away have made a conscious decision to relocate because they can afford to. It's why the prices for large detached houses in rural Shropshire (and many other areas) have increased disproportionately while the less well-heeled live in terraced housing or apartments on urban brownfield sites.
What's all the fuss about? His wife does not want to cycle because a helmet will mess up her hair... but the good news is that she can _actually get on a bicycle and cycle without a helmet_ and the only difference will be that she has her hair as she likes it at the end of her pleasant, helmet-free journey.
Helmets are not a necessary part of cycling and if it's the only thing stopping her then she should just hop on the bike and enjoy herself.
No no no no no... Don't invoke the helmet debate; L Willo will rise from their grave and we'll never hear the end of it!
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