Category Archives: Activism

I’m a programmer – and driverless cars scare the hell out of me

5 June, 2018 Joe Leave a comment

Tech-savvy developer types often ride bikes, and often instinctively back the idea of robot vehicles. After all, the subconscious asks, if I can code a computer to play a game, what’s so hard about getting it to move around a real map?

But driverless cars are not like ‘normal’ AI. They exist in a world with all-too real consequences. For the first time we’re asking billions of people to cede control of a lethal machine to a still-highly-experimental, incredibly complicated, autonomous system. Noise, edge cases and unusual behaviours not present in training data all abound. Autonomous vehicles will be more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, not less.

Bikes and people can suddenly reverse, or move sideways, or in diagonally. They can even jump! This means to truly safely deal with these types of users – call it the ‘Friday Night In Peckham Test’ – is a much bigger challenge than a motorway, where three lanes of users move in predictable patterns, and all between 40-80MPH.

There’s a reason car manufacturers are testing away from towns, and won’t share testing data, or test specifications. They’d rather not have to deal safely with pedestrians and bikes because they know how much more costly they are. So car-makers would rather they went away. They’ll probably get their wish because they’re marque ‘heavy industry’ employers, and because AI belongs to the sleek shiny optimistic future of tech that all politicians are desperate to court.

Instead we will see two worrying developments to shift responsibility from car makers. There will be pressure to gradually remove troublesome bikes and pedestrians from parts of the roads ‘for their own safety’. We’ve already started to see this.

Alternatively manufacturers will introduce two levels of AI – a truly autonomous ‘safe mode’ which overreacts to all stimuli with infuriatingly (unworkably) slow speeds, or a ‘sport setting’ which makes much riskier decisions to enable faster speeds, under the flimsy caveat that users ‘monitor the system more actively’. Most will prefer to travel faster but few will be bothered to supervise the AI closely or consistently, when Netflix and social media are available distractions.

Finally, a growing body of evidence shows that too much automation of routine tasks can make them more dangerous, not less. Airline pilots’ skills atrophy when autopilot handles most of their flying time – with literally lethal consequences when an emergency occurs. Car drivers – most of whom already take driving far less seriously than such a dangerous activity merits – will suffer the same fate. Who would bet on a driver, suddenly handed control back in an emergency situation, taking the right decision in a split-second if they have perhaps hardly driven for years?

We’d just started to halt the decades long declines in cycling and walking rates, and lower urban speeds to 20MPH (‘twenty’s plenty’ initiatives), but the rise of autonomous vehicles will likely threaten this and see walking and cycling people relegated to third place, behind fleets of AI cars travelling bumper to bumper at far higher speeds than today and a few die-hard petrolheads defiantly navigating their own vintage tanks among the whizzing fleet.

One of the best things about my teenage years was romping around town on foot or bikes with my mates. My daughter turns 16 in 2030. It’s terrifying to think that by then, the killer robots that end her life might not be gun-toting drones, put plain old delivery vans.

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Activism

Only Corbyn can save the Left

19 April, 2017 Joe Leave a comment

Labour go into this election with the dice stacked against Corbyn, as the Tories intended. But here’s the thing – he’s only an election liability *if* you believe he can win.

But in fact everyone – surely even the man himself – can see there is *no chance* of Corbyn being the next PM, even in coalition.

On the 8th June the nation will choose not ‘May or Corbyn’ but ‘big or humungous Tory majority’.

The Lib Dems can’t win either, and again, the whole world knows it. So Brexit is most definitely happening.

Those two facts mean the left can neutralise Tory scaremongering on a ‘PM Corbyn’ or ‘Brexit backsliding’. That’s how we move the conversation on to what kind of country we want. There the Tories are on a much weaker foundation. The fact is, NINE years after the banking crisis, and seven years after they took power, the Tories have cut and wrecked at every opportunity, the longest, most savage swipe at living standards in memory. They will keep on, and on, and on at our pockets because they are ideologically unable to think of anything else.

So if the left can only acknowledge that no, they can’t win this time, no, they can’t stop Brexit, and no, Corbyn won’t be PM, they can turn on to arguments that are winnable. Better yet, a tacit pact to collaborate (perhaps supporting Compass to produce a social-media-friendly ‘tactical voting app’ based on postcodes or similar) would lay the necessary foundations for a proper power grab in 2022 – when the Tories will have been in power for over a decade.

I suspect this would be the Tories’ worst nightmare. May’s gamble would completely backfire – winning the election (narrowly) but losing the national argument.

The key is only Corbyn, or those close to him, can trigger this. Perhaps the Easter significance will inspire them…

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Activism, Blog

‘Stretched resources’ applies to parliamentarians, too…

2 February, 2017 Joe Leave a comment

I listened to a sad story on BBCR4 today this morning – a grieving mother can’t bury her daughter, murdered, because there’s no body – in years of searching none has been found. The killer isn’t co-operating (they don’t have to, although it would improve their parole terms to do so). She wants a change in the law so murderers can’t get parole until a body is produced (habeas corpus, literally).

This is a worthy campaign, and it must blight her life. Thing is, this scenario affects ’70 whole families’, by her own numbers. Just 70 in the whole of the UK. A change in the *law* for this? A law which has to go through parliamentary scrutiny (twice), occupying time and resources.

Couldn’t sentencing just be updated, instead?

We have a vast number of small, tiny, individually important laws but are they collectively eating away at the vitality of our democracy? MPs need to be wrestling with and thoroughly, openly, debating the massive challenges of our time – automation, climate change, ageing, food security, migration. Most complain of long hours. Not every minor cause is lucky to have an effective MP to champion it, either – which ‘good ideas’ make it into law is arbitrary, in this sense. And finally: should we have hundreds of such minor bills on the book?

Or a simpler legal code, with more judges, able to devote more time to judicious sentencing, and a fast effective appeals process for victims and the convicted if they feel sentences and parole are unjust?

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Activism, Blog, Science

Science and (small) business

22 October, 2016 Joe Leave a comment

Over the last 10-20 years there’s been a revolution in academic science (or should that be ‘coup’?) where many aspects of the job have been professionalised and formalised, especially project management but management in general. This generally includes tools like GANTTs, milestones, workload models, targets and many other things previously unmentionable in academia but common in industry, especially large organisations. Lots of academics will tell you they think it’s bureaucratic overkill, intrusive, a waste of time, and worse (to put it mildly) but the awkward truth is that, as lab groups steadily increased in size (as fewer, larger grants went to increasingly senior PIs or consortia) many of the limitations of the collegiate style of the past, centred on a single academic with a tight-knit group, have been exposed.

Frequently the introduction of ‘management practices’, often after hiring expensive consultants, is accompanied by compulsory management training. Sometimes it can be an improvement. More normally (in my experience) whether an improvement in outcomes (as distinct from ‘efficiency’) has been achieved probably depends on whether you cost in staff time (or overtime) and morale. You can make arguments either way.

But I can’t help thinking: why are we attempting to replicate practices from big/massive private sector organisations, anyway? I suspect, the answer in part is because those are the clients management consultants have the most experience working with. More seriously, those organisations differ in fundamental respects from even the largest universities, let alone individual research projects. This is because large companies:

Add value to inputs to create physical goods or services that are easily costed by the market mechanism (this is the big one)
Usually have large cash reserves, or easy access to finance (tellingly when this ends they usually get liquidated)
Keep an eye on longer-term outcomes, but primarily focus on the 5-10 year horizon
Compete directly with others for customers (in some respects an infinite resource)
Are answerable, at least, yearly, to shareholders – with share value and dividends being the primary drivers of shareholder satisfaction.

Meanwhile, universities (and to an even greater extreme, research groups/PIs):

Produce knowledge outputs with zero market value*
Live hand-to-mouth on short grants
Need long-term, strategic thinking to succeed (really, this is why we get paid at all)
Compete indirectly for finite resources grants and publications, based partly on track record and partly on potential.
Answer, ultimately, to posterity, their families, and their Head Of Department

I want to be clear here – I’m not saying, by any means, that previous management techniques (ie, ‘none’) work well in today’s science environment – but I do think we should probably look to other models than, say General Motors, or GlaxoSmithKline. The problem is often compounded because PIs have no business experience (certainly not in startups) while consultants often come from big business – their ability to meet in the middle is limited.

Instead small and medium enterprises (SME)s are a much closer model to how science works. Here good management of resources and people is extremely important, but the scale is much smaller, permitting different management methods, often focussing on flexibility and results, not hierarchies and systems. For instance, project goals are often still designed to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-scaled) but these will be revisited often and informally, and adjusted whenever necessary. Failure is a recognised part of the ongoing process. This is the exact opposite to how a GANTT, say, is used in academia: often drawn up at the project proposal (design) stage, it is then ignored until the end of the grant, when the PI scrabbles to fudge the outcomes, goals, or both to make the work actually carried out fit, so they don’t get a black mark from the funder/HoD for missing targets.

There are plenty of other models, and they vary not just by organisation size/type (e.g. tech startup, games studio, SkunkWorks, logistics distributor, niche construction subcontractor) but you see what I mean: copying ‘big business’ wholesale without looking at the whole ecosystem of business practices makes little sense…

*Obviously not all, or even most, scientific output will never realise any economic value – but it can be years, or centuries removed from the work to create it. And spin-outs are relevant to a tiny proportion of PI’s work, even in applied fields.

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Activism, Blog, Cycling

Making progress down the road

15 September, 2016 Joe Leave a comment

Too many laws and customs of driving make speed more important than safety, from the driving instructors’ “make good progress down the road” (e.g. “hurry the fuck up”, which most drivers internalise as “drive at least as fast as the speed limit unless there’s literally another car right in front of you”), to every transport investment ever being marketed to (presumably furious) taxpayers as “reducing journey times”.

This is in contrast to other European countries, where safety is #1, and speed just a nice-to-have. Surely it’s time for the national Government to admit – as London’s TfL have – that the UK is blessed with only a fixed amount of road space, so with growing numbers of people using it, we all have to accept that journeys will get slower in future, not quicker.

We have a real blind spot (pun intended) in the UK about traffic jams. On the one hand, we are only too aware of all the time we **WASTE** sat in stationary traffic each day – most car journeys are fewer than five miles, made by commuters, and involve up to half that time in queues – so traffic jams are a fact of driving life here in the UK.

On the other hand, peoples’ frustration / anger / surprise about being stuck in a traffic jam on any given morning (when they are, every morning) is total. But this is bizarre… We know the traffic will be there, but still get in our car expecting a free road, at 08:30 on a weekday! Where’s all that traffic come from!

Surely it’s time to admit traffic jams exist, will get worse, not better, and constantly lurching from 0 to 30mph and back again is pointless as well as dangerous?

Imagine a world where the DoT’s published targets and main priority were to reduce accidents per mile travelled, and included walking and cycling targets, not journey times? Where 20mph became the standard urban default speed limit, not exception? Where satnavs routinely pointed out to users when (given traffic conditions) particular journeys, short and long, were quicker by public transport / foot / bike?

A safer UK. A calmer UK. And – just possibly – a healthier, richer, and happier UK.

Imagine.

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Activism, Blog

Labour’s Corbyn election – ten thoughts.

13 July, 2016 Joe 1 Comment

Riiiight so both Corbyn and Angela Eagle can run for Labour Leader, so the election’s on. Labour’s turn to agonise about runners, riders, the gap between party members, the MPs who they volunteer for, and the public who might (or might not) reward them with power. This time round the stakes couldn’t be higher, with a Brexit to influence, likely Scottish independence, and possible general election. Labour’s problems will be acute and more so than the Tories (their spin machine has somehow turned their own fortnight of indecision and ineptitude into an object lesson in ruthlessness… amazing.) This is because Labour’s problems – shifting support bases, policy fracture points, and the large and apparently increasing disconnects between voters, MPs, and a large membership* – are deeper, older, and until recently less-discussed than the Tories’ main weak points on Europe and social liberalism. Here’s my tuppence on this, all collected in one place, in no real order of logic/emphasis:

1) This isn’t the 80s. It isn’t a re-run of Militant, a long-term plan of an external party; Corbyn (at the last election) got a massive majority of Labour Members and Labour Registered Supporters.

2) This isn’t the 90s, or even the Noughties, either. Two-party politics in the UK is dead, dead, dead. Not least because the UK itself as a political entity is heading for the dustbin faster than Cameron’s ‘DC – UK PM’ business cards.

3) It isn’t a ‘Corbyn cult’. Lots of people, me included switched onto Corbyn because of his policies, not the other way round.

4) That ‘7, 7-and-a-half’ performance. Watch the full interview: Did Corbyn bang the EU drum as loudly and clearly as Cameron, Brown, Blair and Major? No. He articulated a nuanced, balanced, fact-based opinion (essentially “I’m broadly in favour of the EU and many of the benefits, but we shouldn’t ignore the problems”) in the way that we kept being told other campaigners weren’t doing – and got castigated for it. Naïve? He’s been into politics for 40-odd years. I think he was just doing what he was elected for, saying what he believes the truth to be, simply.

5) Will Corbyn ever be PM? I personally don’t think so. But the future of UK politics is probably coalitions – see (2) above – so the views he’s highlighted and continues to champion will be (I believe) represented by a coalition or leftist grouping in power.

6) If the problem is style, Angela Eagle isn’t the answer. A bit more centrist… a bit more electable… a bit less weird… a bit less Marxist… sure. But if the problem is that Corbyn isn’t enough like Blair, Eagle isn’t the answer. PM May will utterly decimate her, in seconds.

7) The policies are belters: Renationalising railways; reversing NHS privatisation; A Brexit that prioritises EEA access and freedom of movement over border control; a genuine national living wage, properly enforced; scrapping tuition fees and expanding apprenticeships; environmental protection; socially liberal. Fair personal, corporate, financial and ecological taxation to pay for it. These are all massive and proven winners amongst (variously) from 50+ to 85% of the electorate.

8) Trident is a red herring. Forget it. I’m not sure how I feel about unilateral disarmament personally. But given he’s unlikely to be a majority PM (see above) Corbyn’s stance on nuclear weapons doesn’t really rate in importance for me compared to Brexit, the NHS and taxation. In any case the lifespan of the current system can be extended to postpone that discussion past 2020 – the MoD are actually quite good at kicking stuff like this into the long grass for a bit. By then the left (hard- and centre-) can get themselves into shape for that debate. Dividing ourselves now over something the right are utterly united on, and a clear majority of the public support, is madness (Corbyn even acknowledged so with his defence review). There’s much better reasons to argue…

9) Honest votes are more powerful. By that I mean both that the recent UK referendums showed – to every single person in the country better than a lecture ever could – that first-past-the-post is rotten**, that tactical voting or second-guessing your fellow electors is stupid, dangerous and counterproductive, and that (shock, horror) voting for something you believe in is an energising and rewarding experience in its own right. This is also true of leadership elections, don’t forget; how many Tories egging on Boris now wished they hadn’t? Or backed Gove instead of Leadsom? And lastly…

10) The ‘split risk’…

Tensions in what used to be a millions-strong Labour movement between left-behind poor and optimistic urbanites have become unendurable. They might not lead to a party split (although the press have started to publicly contemplate what lots of us have been saying for a year, or more) but equally might. Should you vote for Corbyn if you want a split, or if you want unity? It’s impossible to know, so see (9) above and vote for the person/policies you prefer.

As to the desirability of a split, well, tensions are often resolved by fractures. There need not be a SDP-type irrelevance created – the political landscape is completely different now, with smaller parties proven and established, and many more proportional elections apart from Westminster in play. More importantly, figures in the Greens, Lib Dems and Labour have already spoken overtly in the press about the need for a new, broad centre-left coalition, which both Labour descendent parties could contribute to without antagonising each other’s supporters. Probably more happily and successfully!

It’s also important to remember that the ‘unite and fight’ ethos that animates the Labour Party – which (especially) Blairite PLP are mobilising to justify opposition to Corbyn, disingenuously I feel – predates the Labour Party by a century or more. Recall the Diggers, Levellers, Abolitionists, various religious groups, Socialists, Trade Unionists… lefty-ness has always been necessarily a big tent, but which poles are placed firmly in the earth and the strength of the storm define how big the canvas is. Progressive movements which want to redistribute power and wealth from the self-protecting, actual, ever-present, and very real, ruling class can’t always be populist, and span acres of political ground, and find expression in a single monolithic electoral party. Sometimes two, but rarely three of those. If it’s time to move the poles around to firmer ground, we should.

So that’s my take. If you can vote, I hope you do…

*However much the PLP might want to, they can’t ignore the fact that a progressive party needs vast numbers of volunteers in their millions, far more than a right-wing party which can afford paid helpers. Substituting volunteers for better fundraising adverts and more millionaire backers is a symptom of the root cause, not a solution.

**Imagine how different our democracy would look if we’d had compulsory voting for the last 20 years, with county-wide party votes used to fill a proportionally-elected House of Lords. How much healthier would we be, then?

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Activism, Blog

On schools testing

13 July, 2016 Joe Leave a comment

Schools testing has been in the news again recently… are SATS etc useful objective measures of a school’s performance? Or do they add unnecessary stress and bureaucracy?

Well I think we can all agree more objectivity and less stress are good things, and most of us would probably go further and say that SATS aren’t doing either of those jobs. But kids are so unique! And testing is so essential! How on earth can we do both?!

Well, sorry. If there’s one field that is actually good at summarising hundreds of thousands of individuals in a heterogeneous population, it’s biology. So here’s A Biologist’s Alternative to SATS. Let’s call it… STATS:

Pick 5-10 measures that are easy to test and cover a wide range of measurable markers of kids’ lives – say, a couple each of literacy and numeracy tests, some critical thinking, standard IQ and general knowledge. Plus, happiness / wellbeing and physical health.
Assemble a mixed team of inspectors, governors, academics and teachers. Have them sample, say, 20 schools from a wide range of areas and rank them.
Then test the kids in those schools using our metrics. Also collect information on their dates of birth, sociological factors (parents’ status, wealth, postcode, commuting distance, screen time – there’s loads of ways to do this), etc.
Now we can construct a GLMM (a slightly-but-not-too complicated statistical model – or else use machine learning stuff like HMMs or neural networks, although I suspect getting enough data would be hard) to model each kid’s scores as a function of their school’s ranked quality given their sociological background.
Here’s the important bit: we take the test scores of the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles and label them ‘below’, ‘on’ and ‘above’ average respectively. But we won’t translate these expected quartile scores directly into national targets because we know the makeup and weighting of school sizes and types across the country will vary greatly and nonlinearly.
Instead the model itself provides a national benchmark, not a standard. This will be used to model the expected scores for a given school (and students) given the same sociological information, most of which can be imputed from child benefit statements, addresses and the like.

Why would this system – more complex to set up and quite data-intensive – be any better than the current one? Here’s a few reasons:

We know development is multifactorial. So is this model.
We know sociology greatly affects kids’ life chances, so let’s explicitly account for it. If the upshot on that is more effort alleviating poverty than endlessly tweaking the school system, great.
We can publish the tests’ relative weightings in the model so teachers/parents know which should be more emphasised.
Grade inflation would be easy to abolish, simply by updating the model every year or so.
The grading of schools would be simpler and integrated. Most schools will be ‘on-average’ – this is implicit – so the horrific postcode lottery will end and parents can agree to focus on improving their local school, which is better for their commute and their kids’ sanity.
Regional or municipal variations due to differences in sociology will also be apparent, and can be evidenced and tackled.

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Activism, Cycling

An appalling, terrible, borderline-criminal proposal from Westminster Council

12 October, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

I’ve just seen the proposal from Westminster Council on a section of the Quietway Grid in their patch from Covent Garden to Waterloo Bridge. A patch, lest we forget that’s used by a lot of bikes:

Cyclists on Waterloo Bridge waiting to cross the Strand (CTC/Roger Geffen)

I’m really pushed for time this week so I won’t write a detailed post on this. In short it is terrible. Virtually nothing proposed at all, and what little there is is for pedestrians, not cyclists! Loads of car parking retained, no modal filters.

Worst of all, on Waterloo Bridge and the Strand junction itself there is nothing, absolutely nothing to protect cyclists. A line of paint on the road is all that’s going to protect you from busses, lorries, coaches and cars. This is 2015, not 1995. The council are mad.

This is the absolute centre of civic life in London and if there isn’t a case for pedestrianising large swathes of it (allowing black cabs to some bits, and perhaps loading/deliveries outside peak hours), then I can’t think where in the UK it would be appropriate to pedestrianise.

As I say, I’m in a mega hurry, so here’s my pasted consultation response:

What on earth is the Council doing? These are appalling proposals. The Council seem to have utterly disregarded the LCDS2 and LCC recommendations for Quietway provision and instead decided to do virtually nothing. Where money *is* spent it is on pavement widening to benefit pedestrians, not cycling. There is no reason whatsoever why these streets, right in the heart of London, should be accessed by private cars. Taxis, yes, deliveries/loading yes (at prescribed times) but all private cars, all the time? Madness.

Unless additional permeability measures benefit bikes, and modal filters discourage cars, they will struggle to create a cycle-friendly network that encourages cycling as an everyday activity.

Furthermore lots of car parking and loading bays *are* retained which (contrary to stated on the plan) create pinch points and encourage car use. Instead the spaces should be inset to the pavement if they are to be retained at all.

Section 1 (Bow St etc) – there is hardly anything here proposed to comment on. No modal filters, nothing. Strongly oppose.

Section 2 (Covent Garden etc) – again nothing for cycling to comment on at all. The gain of raised tables will be more than offset by retained car parking and to include footway resurfacing as part of a ‘cycling scheme’ is laughable.

Section 3 (Strand) – the only element of this proposal that is genuinely welcome is dropping the junction across the Strand to carriageway level. The rest of the section propsal is nonsense (again, why are private cars to be allowed to drive and park outside the Lyceum, exactly?!) and the unprotected central feeder lane on Waterloo Bridge n/bound is utter madness. It belongs in the 1990s and will be incredibly dangerous – encouraging some novices to the centre of the traffic whilst providing zero protection. If a traffic lane can be lost then why not provide a fully segregated facility on this incredibly busy bridge?

Section 4 (Waterloo bridge northern end) – this proposal is so close to criminally liable I’m amazed the Council even let it out into the public domain. Given the documented incredibly high cycle mode share on this bridge, to protect cycle traffic with a **single white line of paint on the road** eg a mandatory on-road cycle lane, when there is a central reservation present, is beyond belief. This won’t do anything, *at* *all* to improve safety.

TO call this a cycling scheme is wholly disingenuous and the Council should consider seriously whether they have opened themselves to a judicial review by doing so.

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Activism, Cycling

Camberwell Green consultation closing – reject these plans!

12 August, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

(Reposted from SouthwarkCyclists.org.uk…)

Southwark Council propose expensive and disruptive alterations to Camberwell Green junction and area. The plans are terrible. Southwark Cyclists have thoroughly examined their proposal with expert advice and we have decided to formally reject these plans.

Please respond to the consultation TODAY, rejecting the proposal, link here: https://consultations.southwark.gov.uk/environment-leisure/camberwell-town-centre-public-realm-improvements

The consultation closes tomorrow (Thurs 13th August). It only takes a minute or two to do. Please forward this email to all your friends and cycling or walking colleagues, encouraging them to reject the proposal too. Because this is a formal council consultation, not some online petition your voice counts – the council have to rethink if enough people object.

The council have to go back and rethink these terrible plans, which do nothing for cycling, and could do much more for walking. They are purely cosmetic alterations which do nothing to improve the terrible safety record of this junction, which includes one death already this year.

This is our reasoning – you can read the document in full at this link:

Southwark Cyclists reject these proposals.
Southwark Council’s proposals for Camberwell Green alterations do nothing to address serious and worsening safety issues for cyclists.
These largely cosmetic alterations also miss several opportunities to substantially improve crossing times and safety for pedestrians.
These proposals assume increasing traffic flow when TfL’s own figures show car ownership, use, and miles travelled are all decreasing in this part of London. The Council’s own figures and transport policy forecast a rise in cycle numbers.
We urge Southwark Council and Transport for London to reconsider their approach to this key junction and the Camberwell Green area. Space for cycling at the junction and/or a cycle bypass are feasible alternatives to their proposals.

Sensible Alternatives

A number of sensible alternatives exist which could be built in a similar amount of time and disruption, and would greatly improve the safety and convenience of the area for cyclists and pedestrians alike:

: Six lanes of traffic at Camberwell Green – on Denmark Hill looking south.

The public environment. Firstly, even the council recognise that the Green itself is a retail and services destination. Thousands of local people use the Green every day for shopping, the library, pharmacy, clinic and courts. But the public environment on Camberwell Church Street and Denmark Hill (outside Butterfly Walk) is intimidating for pedestrians and cyclists alike, with trucks and coaches hurtling down six lanes of traffic at 30mph+, as this picture shows. It’s hard to cross and no wonder so many people prefer to drive short distances to these shops. The proposal does nothing to improve the environment – although the pavement itself will get some expensive new stone, nothing will be done to make it easier or more inviting to get to the Green by bike or on foot, or cross the road once you’re there. Southwark Cyclists propose the town centre, one of the historic local greens of South London, be more imaginatively redesigned as a retail and services destination where pedestrians and cyclists come first. This can be done while maintaining traffic capacity, but calming it.

: Space for Cycling at the crossroads. Although both Southwark Council and Transport for London are committed to decreasing cycle and pedestrian deaths and injuries on the roads, and increasing numbers of cycling and walking trips in Southwark by 2020, the junction design Southwark Council propose is straight out of the 1980s – ‘stuff traffic through as quickly as possible, and hope nothing goes wrong’. In fact it’s barely different from the current layout here (one death already this year…) except that, incredibly, there are fewer cycle facilities than now. In conjunction with experts from another London borough and the London Cycling Campaign, Southwark Cyclists propose an alternative design for the green where pedestrians, cyclists and motor traffic all move separately. This layout will retains motor vehicle capacity, is safe for cyclists, and far more convenient for larger numbers of pedestrians. To read more, see our consultation response.

A bus hub – in Orpheus Street, not the high street. One of the council’s motivations for doing anything at all is the large numbers of pedestrians waiting for busses on the pavement outside the shopping centre. Often these spill out into the road; it’s unsafe and hard to get past with a pushchair or wheelchair. Instead of the council’s plans (which actually add hardly any space at all on the pavement in question, and do nothing to calm the traffic at all) we suggest several bus stops could be moved 10-20m down, into Orpheus Street, creating a local bus hub. With proper lighting and other features, this could also be a much safer place to wait, and would create additional retail or services frontages in Orpheus Street, which at the moment is a barren alley with just the art shop. Why move the bus stops at all? Well, moving them from the high street (Denmark Hill) would make the crossing simpler for pedestrians, make driving easier for cars (no busses cutting in and out suddenly), make cycling safer (by freeing space for a bike lane) and the environment far more pleasant for everyone.

Basically, there are several options, far better than the Council’s plans. Reject these plans today (Thurs 13th August closing date) and send them back to the drawing board!

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Activism, Blog, Cycling

In support of… taxis

5 March, 2015 Joe 1 Comment

Here’s where I’m coming from with this one. Let me say it simply:

More regular cyclists means lower private car ownership, less congestion for taxis to deal with, and more non-car-owners taking taxi trips.

OK, now for the detailed bit…

An organisation called the London Taxi Drivers’ Association (LTDA) – representing about a third of black cabs apparently, so a minority – has been railing against Transport for London (TfL)’s £913 million investment in cycling over this decade. They’re led by a bloke called Steve McNamara, who (when he’s not comparing cyclists to ISIS) complains that this is far too much money. It’s kicked up quite a fuss.

I’m not sure how much money he thinks should be spent to reducing the 145 deaths and 4496 serious injuries to cyclists, in London, in the last decade. He doesn’t say. And he doesn’t point out either that over the same period as that £0.9bn cycling spend TfL are allocating £34bn to other modes of transport. But rather than laying into taxi drivers, I actually want to use this post to support and (in a roundabout way) defend them.

Now I’m going a bit out of my comfort zone here. I’ve had run-ins with taxis, including one serious accident (he pulled a U-turn without signalling as I filtered outside stationary traffic, wiped me out, and drove off after giving false information, illegally). But you can attribute that to us both being in a hurry. Generally, although there isn’t an additional driving competency test to be a cabbie (the Knowledge tests wayfinding, not driving skill – which means cabbies are no less or more qualified than anyone else with a cat B license), cabbies are fairly aware of their surroundings. And they’re used to driving near bikes. This means that when finely judging risk – as I have to do every second on the road as a cyclist, something I barely have to bother with when I’m driving – I am more worried by a tourist in a private car than a taxi.

So I’m happy to share the roads with cabs. But it seems a minority of them don’t really reciprocate that – in fact they hate cyclists – and I really, really can’t see why.

The argument against bikes, from the taxi cab, is two-pronged as far as I can tell: that bikes clutter up the road, slowing traffic, and secondly that bikes take fares away from taxis. Let’s look at those:

Do bikes clutter up the road? Well in a word, no! On a typical zone 1-3 trip, even on Mrs. LJP’s clunky old sit-up-and-beg bike, I’ll overtake every vehicle along the way except motorbikes. And that’s without jumping lights, overtaking unsafely, or breaking a sweat. Congestion is just so bad that I can’t help it, something the data proves. So I don’t cause congestion, I leapfrog it. That row of stationary cars with a single person in on the A11? Those aren’t bikes, they’re, well.. cars.

Ah! Say the drivers at this point: Bikes are causing that! By taking road space! So if only we built more roads! Well… most of the vehicles on the roads are still private cars, and each one takes the space of 4-10 bikes, depending on the traffic conditions, so I think we could make our own minds up on that one. Not that we need to: TfL have said, officially, that they are simply unable to wring any more space out of London’s roads for private cars [link 2]. In the next decade-and-a-half, London will gain an extra million-and-a-half-people. That’s why they’ve been investing heavily in bikes, walking, and public transport for the last 10 years. It isn’t that they’ve suddenly become hippies – I’ve met a fair few of them and they’re all pretty small-C conservative – but because, as engineers they make decisions based on evidence, and the simple fact is there isn’t any more space to use in London, and cycling, public transport and – yes – taxis are the most efficient use of that space, not private cars.

Secondly do bikes take fares away from taxis? Well taxi fares are under pressure from minicabs and Hailo, but that’s nothing to do with cycles (although it is a lot to do with private car use in the centre of London again) so let’s just note that it would be more appropriate for the LTDA to focus their ire on that and move on. I suppose we can split
taxi fares into two types – regular short hops during the day/evening, in central London, and longer trips that happen occasionally. Taxis prefer the first type as it’s a much better income stream – more predictable and less hassle (fair enough).

Well if city workers are choosing to use bikes over taxis, presumably because it’s cheaper, quicker, and more convenient, then that’s a pretty damning indictment of taxis’ levels of service. And does the LTDA think it’ll win these customers back by ranting at them? Doubt it.

This leads onto the second point about bikes and taxi fares – cyclists are also taxi customers – and big ones. Car ownership has been declining in every London borough, for two decades – but driving licence registrations have held steady. So how do all these non-car-owners get about? Well, our daughter is nearly a year old, and we walk, we cycle (without her), we use public transport, we hire cars for longer trips and, for shopping trips etc, – guess what – we take taxis! Now at the moment our daughter is small enough that’s not a problem, it works well. But in a year from now, we’ll need to cycle with her for some trips – if its safe enough to do so. If it isn’t we can’t afford lots of taxi trips to take her to the nursery etc – and we’ll be forced to buy a car. And then we’ll probably never take a taxi again; why would we when we have a car?

Put really simply, more regular cyclists means lower private car ownership, less congestion for taxis to deal with, and more people taking taxi trips.

So I’ll ask it again: why is the LTDA so against cyclists?

Not minicabs?
Not Hailo?
Not unlicensed mopeds?
Not private cars?

These are all far bigger inconveniences to their working lives, and far bigger threats to their livelihood – but the LTDA have picked on cyclists – why? The simplest explanation to me is they just don’t like bikes. It’s visceral, it’s illogical, and it’s short-sightedly picking on the one group of other road users who ought to be natural allies. If I was a cabbie, especially an LTDA member, I’d be spitting teeth at LTDA’s failure to spot a natural ally, and work with them. But hey, it takes all sorts… right?

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