When is cycle funding not cycle funding?

....when it goes to Cycling Scotland...

The Minister of Transport in Scotland has responded to a Parliamentary question and several Freedom of Information requests to the effect that the £424000 which funded the Niceway Code is not 'cycle funding'.  That's good, because that campaign was so 'balanced' and 'targeted' all road users equally, that it would clearly be unfair if it was 'cycling money' right?

Except that in July, the Minister also claimed that £58 million was being 'spent on cycling' in Scotland. We've already explored how that isn't quite what it seems.

But interestingly, that £58million did include a budget line for Cycling Scotland - £2.424 million in 13-14 - with £424 000 being just the amount that was budgeted for the #nicewaycode.  Interesting coincidence?  Nope.  That is indeed the allocation for the much-maligned 'mutual respect' campaign.

So, it is cycling money then, I guess?

Except the Minister says it isn't....

Except when he says that it is....

I've seen enough, have you?

A letter to my MSPs

I don't know whether you saw the recent Open Letter to Alex Salmond, of which I was one signatory.  It was published in the Herald on the 15th http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/letters/nice-way-code-campaign-merely-reinforces-dangerous-divisions.21878091

It sums up many of my concerns about the NiceWayCode campaign, which is supposed to be about road safety, but, in my view fails in many regards. I could critique all of the ads so far in many ways, but the latest one - seen in today's Herald - is really the final straw. 

Thanks to @greendadtwit for the image

Is this an appropriate image for the Scottish government to be paying to display in our newspapers?  Do they really want to send a message that says all cyclists are foul-mouthed, anti-social characters?  My 6 year old is an expert 'signaller' on the back of my tandem.  How am I supposed to explain this 'new' signal when we see it on bus shelters and taxis?

Can you think of any other group in society that would be targeted with an ad like this?   Now I'll admit that some cyclists may give drivers 'the finger', but I suspect in all those cases it is because a driver has endangered their life.  I have never 'fingered' a driver, but I have had drivers make rude gestures at me, and shout vile abuse out
their windows, when I have had small children on the back of my bike. And in none of those cases was I doing anything illegal or reckless - except wanting to take my kids on a bike instead of in a car.

Please can you bring these degrading adverts to your parties, and ask the Scottish government to halt this campaign immediately?  Last week, I would have said the campaign was condescending and rude, but this week it seems to have moved to an entirely new level.

I have tried to engage the campaign with my critiques, and they keep saying 'don't judge us until you've seen the whole campaign.'  Well, I've seen enough now. I hope you have too.

When improving facilities for cyclists isn't worth it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm keen on any schemes that improve the infrastructure for cyclists.  But I don't want this to be at the expense of pedestrian space.  It's hard enough already to walk along many of our pavements pushing a buggy with an older child alongside.  And we don't need any more excuses for pedestrians to complain about cyclists.

If pavements are to be made shared use, the space needs to be adequate for all users - not simply cutting into pedestrians' space and throwing users into conflict.  Shared use paths like the NEPN and the paths in the meadows and the links do this well, although not always without conflict (the canal in particular highlights these tensions).  There are a few other shared used paths dotted around the city.  The only one I use at all frequently is a new path under the train/tram bridge at Russell road - not an area with many pedestrians.  It is nice and wide and seems to work fine (except that it then drops cyclists onto a fast-moving road  alongside parked cars). 

What I have learned, however, is that the link from Russell Rd to the canal, the link from the canal to the Meadows, and the one from the Meadows to the Innocent railway are all budgeted for as 'shared use footways'.

These are three of the biggest 'missing links' in Edinburgh's Family Network, a key component of the Active Travel Action Plan (ATAP). If these links are well-designed, there is real potential for cyclists in the south-west of the city to be able to cycle off-road all the way to Musselburgh in the East, Cramond in the west (and beyond to Fife), and Leith in the north and vice-versa.  The possibilities are limitless. (I blogged about it here a few months ago).

But I have yet to see any plans beyond the ones in ATAP (page 23). Not for want of asking.    But today I found out that this year's budget is already made out for 'shared use pavements, crossings and signage' (not widened pavements, mind, just 'shared ones'). 

Maybe this will all turn out to be brilliantly designed infrastructure - it's surely in everyone's interest to do so as it would massively improve mobility all over the city. 

But, if it is to be done via shared use pavements in really busy parts of the city, then there's the issue of adequate space, but also familiarity. Edinburgh has very few shared space pavements. The ones that do exist tend to be not along carriageways, but on off-road paths like in the Meadows.  So, a couple of months ago, I participated in this little exchange on twitter: 

1. ＥＤＩＮ #ＷＯＲＳＴＤＲＩＶＥＲＳ ‏@EDIWorstDrivers27 May

   We have videos from cyclists showing how bad drivers of #Edinburgh are - here is a video, of a cyclist, on a pavement http://youtu.be/41aQMC60-VU 

    View media
   

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2. Allan Rogers ‏@roghino7027 May

   @EDIWorstDrivers On the dual use path from Seafield to Portobello unless I'm mistaken. If so that's where he's supposed to be! #cycling

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3. Sara Dorman ‏@SRDorman27 May

   @roghino70 @EDIWorstDrivers thanks for confirming. that's what i thought, but hadn't been there myself

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4. ＥＤＩＮ #ＷＯＲＳＴＤＲＩＶＥＲＳ ‏@EDIWorstDrivers27 May

   @SRDorman @roghino70 is there any info on this? Never heard of a dual use path before - doesn't sound very safe to me :-(

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5. 
   

   Bruce MacDonald ‏@Uberuce27 May

   @EDIWorstDrivers http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/file/3007/core_path_plan_map … It's quicker to list the ones that aren't shared use: Leamington, MMW, Broomhouse, West Granton.

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6. Size Twelve ‏@BigTaes Prott27 May

   @Uberuce @EDIWorstDrivers This Streetview shot shows the path marked as 'shared use' on the lamppost: http://bit.ly/ZaDnt2 

    Hide conversation

As this suggests, someone with a dedication to revealing bad driving in Edinburgh not only doesn't know about shared use pavements, but doesn't recognize the signs for one either.  Which suggests to me that any expansion of shared use pavements is likely to lead to a lot of shouts of 'get off the pavement and onto the road' (especially if they've seen those #nicewaycode adverts). 

My optimism is not reinforced by the few existing examples that I know of.  Brandfield Street is a good one.  There's a better picture here.  Or Seafield St - described here at Barney's Bike Blog.  If there are other bits of shared use pavement around town, I don't know of them, but certainly neither Seafield St nor Brandfield St mentioned here are wide enough for cyclists and pedestrians to negotiate comfortably (unlike the main Seafield Path).  The Seafield St one at least has some tactile paving on it to alert visually impaired pedestrians, but I'm not sure how they would interpret it, given that those bubbles are supposed to alert them to hazards, not to the start of shared use facilities (if I'm wrong here, please let me know).

If we've learned one thing from the fiasco of painting lines on roads and calling them cyclepaths, it should be not to engineer road users into conflict with each other.  Sadly, the current schemes, whether through a desire to do them on the cheap, a lack of vision, or a lack of political commitment, seem destined to just that.

I'm just hoping I'm proved wrong, and that these examples above are just teething troubles.  But these links are too important to get wrong.


[Thurs 15th - please note that I have edited third last para slightly to remove potential confusion regarding which roads I was talking about]

Why do we need the 'nicewaycode' when we already have the Highway Code?

What does the nicewaycode do that the highway code doesn't already do?  As far as I can tell, it merely adds a 'light-hearted tone'.  Excuse me for being a spoilsport, but I don't think anyone who has ever lost a family member to an 'accident' will be happy about that.  

I count myself lucky to have survived a big nasty highway-closing multi-car pileup with an articulated lorry towing propane many years ago, and still can't hear sirens without shuddering.  If I know my family is out on the road, I wait with unreasoning anxiety until they come tumbling in the door.  Like many, I worry every day that something might happen on a commute to take me away from my beloved family. So, when I'm told that road users need to hear something in a humorous way in order to take it seriously, even though it is stuff they are already required to do by law (not to mention common-sense), I'm afraid I just don't find it funny. 

I'm sick of taxi drivers telling me to 'go read the highway code' when I'm the one following it to the letter, and they're the ones violating it.  I'm sick of seeing drivers running reds at an intersection I use twice a day, only to see the filth and scorn poured out at cyclists on twitter.  I'm sick of seeing drivers failing to indicate before turning onto the road outside my kids' school, and failing to look in their mirrors or shoulder-checking before pulling into the road - when they've stopped in a no stopping or loading zone. 

Let's all follow the Highway Code, and then we might all get (safely) along (the road). 

But let's be done with this fake bonhomie that pretends that a little humour will make everything okay, and the pretentious claims that some sort of 'research' has shown that this is a plausible expenditure of taxpayer's money. (Serious question - did the nicewycode's  research include talking to victims' families?, or the perpetrators of fatal accidents?  Did either of them think some 'light hearted' messages would help? Or that if they'd been nicer, the roads would have been safer that day?)

S'not nice

I don't have any kittens, so here's a scenery picture instead.

I went off and communed with nature for a few days before writing this post, hoping that my anger and frustration would abate enough for me to write coherently.  Not sure it worked. (Hence the juvenile title)

The Scottish government launched a new 'cycling safety' programme on Monday. On Sunday, Pedal on Parliament had put out a statement. We knew enough about the campaign to know that we weren't keen on it, but even we didn't expect just how silly it all would be.

I could show you the picture of the Transport Minister looking particularly gormless.  Or the wordpress blog that they didn't blow all our money on (cause it's free, and not very well done despite that).  But my real favourite is the first tweet:  @nicewaycode Let's all get along. 11:14 AM - 25 Jul 2013

My husband honestly thought it was a tweet from the parody account, not the real one.

But no, this was the first word from the campaign.  I've written before about why I don't think that educational campaigns are what we need.  And about why campaigns that focus on individual behaviour are a way of the government sloughing off responsibility onto 'society', rather than grappling with the underlying environment.  But really, if they're going to take 'cycling money' and throw it at 'all road users' the best they can do is tell us to be 'nice' to each other? This would be ridiculous at the best of times, but coming after a series of cyclist deaths on Scotland's roads (a toll which is rising each year, not dropping, despite the Minister's repeated claims), it is downright insulting.  

Where educational campaigns have worked - eg seatbelts, or second-hand smoke, or drunk-driving - they've successfully changed norms to the point that smoking in front of your kids became a no-no, and the shame of being caught drunk-driving became unthinkable for professionals.  But these campaigns didn't just target attitudes by asking people to be 'nicer'.  They hit people on the head with scientific facts and gory pictures of diseased lungs.  They emphasized that the kid hit by the drunk-driver could have been your kid. That the individual constraint of wearing a seatbelt was worth it for your health and the costs to society.

But where's the hard hitting ad saying 'is 5 seconds of your time worth a close overtake that might take Jimmy's dad away from him'? or leave Anna paralyzed and unable to work?  Why aren't they giving stats about red-light jumping and other infractions?  Where's the commitment from the Police to take complaints made by cyclists seriously?  And I don't mean a one week 'enforcement exercise' that gives warnings, or has to issue an equal number of tickets to cyclists as to drivers.  I mean a serious commitment to enforce regulations - the Highway Code, not the nicewaycode - about how to drive around vulnerable road users?

We don't need a 'nicewaycode'. We need enforcement of the existing rules and regulations, coupled with public information campaigns that bring facts to the foreground, not cheesy grins, and a commitment from the government to invest in making roads safer, not just wishing that they become so through individuals regulating their own behaviour.

We do need to change norms about how cyclists, drivers and pedestrians interact, but asking us to 'get along' and 'play nice' isn't going to get more people on bikes, or make those of us who already are feel any safer.

Space for cycling: more radical than you realize

Cycling Scotland's flagship programme for cycle safety is called 'cyclespace' and involves pictures of kids on bikes asking 'give me cycle space'.   

I've just worked out what's wrong with it.   (I'm a bit late to the party)

Compare it with the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) posters used to such good effect in recent protests. 

The difference isn't in the pics of cute kids. The difference is in the 'me'.  It's the individualizing of the issues.  In one it is a request made to drivers on a one-by-one basis - constantly negotiated. 

Cycling Scotland is saying, if you see a little kid cycling in front of you, give them space. Maybe that will even translate into space for us big people on bikes too.  

But the LCC campaign isn't asking for individual negotiations between drivers and cyclists.  Nor even for drivers to show respect and follow the highway code (which were the other two brilliant suggestions from the Transport Minister to a toll of rising deaths and injuries). 

It's asking for a state-led redistribution of space. An institutional and infrastructural change that redefines who is allowed where. 

That's why it's so radical, not because of the required expenditure (which would be recouped by the state anyway), but because it identifies the way in which roadspace  and our use of it has been liberalized and individualised, and because it challenges those presumptions about how our behaviour should be shaped and regulated. 

We know that behavioural campaigns don't work, but in asking for infrastructural change, we're not just asking for better, more effective, scientifically proven change that will make Scotland a better place to live, we're also resisting attempts to reduce everything to individual transactions, and demanding instead societal responsibility, mandated through our elected representatives and paid for by our taxes. 

Of course we should all show respect for other road users, and follow the highway code, but reducing road safety to individual behaviour is morally and ethically bankrupt. 

When is 'infrastructure' not infrastructure?

On the way back from yesterday's berry picking expedition, we stopped off to do a little shopping.  The North Edinburgh Path Network (NEPN),  which is what enabled our run yesterday  to be mostly off-road, runs past a substantial shopping complex - what Americans call 'big box' shops.  While we get most of our meat and veg at the farmer's market, there are always a few things that need to come from the supermarket.  So, having the trailer, we stopped and did a big family shop.  

On the one hand, this was easy, there is a short path off the main route, which takes a couple of yards to get to a toucan crossing.  But here the challenge starts.  The toucan crossing is protected by chicanes, which would be fine if they weren't at the bottom of a slight slope, and with a road on the other side.  Then, once you get across the road, there's a short shared-use path. Except it's not marked as shared-use, and it winds past a small playpark, so is usually clogged with harassed mums with toddlers and pushchairs. 

But all that's basically okay compared to where the path dumps you out. Which is over a kerb into full-on traffic.  Is this a candidate for Edinburgh's most useless (and shortest) bikelane? 

From there on in, although there's lots of bike parking available, you're stuck on roads and roundabouts.  The  pavements and zebra-crossings are okay for pedestrians (if not always where they ought to be), but there's no indication that cyclists are allowed on the pavements. And we're definitely not supposed to ride across zebra crossings. The way out is even worse - there's no way to get back on the access path, so you end up in a scary multi-lane thing with dodgy lane-changing,  trying to make a right-turn so as to get back to the NEPN, which is only a few yards away, but feels like another world. 

And that's why we don't just need 'infrastructure'. We need joined-up infrastructure,  which actually works rather than putting cyclists into danger, which isn't just drawn by some engineers or planners to 'tick boxes', but actually thought about by people who cycle.

Things I don't want to hear politicians saying...

"Even one fatality is too many".  How often do we hear this from policy-makers?  Too often. Usually after another fatality.  

I've been meaning to blog about HGVs for a while.  Today seems like a 'good' day for it, after an Edinburgh cyclist was one of two men killed by an HGV while on a charity ride from Lands End to John O'Groats.  

This post from British Cycling last month actually covers much of what I was going to say, reminding us that "In London, HGVs were involved in 53% of cycling fatalities in 2011 despite making up just 4% of the traffic".   I don't think we have clear data on this for Edinburgh, but certainly at least 3 recent fatalities in the city involved lorries of various kinds.  

In Dublin where they have banned the largest lorries from the city streets, cycling increased from 8% to 30% in one year.  In Paris, where HGVs are strictly controlled, there were no cycling fatalities at all in 2011, and a much lower rate of serious injuries than in our comparable big cities, despite rising numbers of cyclists.

But the example that I'd really like to see us learn from is Utrecht, where they have something called a

http://www.24oranges.nl/2009/07/19/inner-city-cargo-train-system-in-utrecht/

'cargo-hopper'.  Basically, HGVs deliver their loads to a depot outside the city, and then an electric fleet of vehicles make the deliveries in smaller batches.  The cargo-hoppers are electric, and solar-powered, so quiet and low-emissions.  As you can see in the picture, they are also designed to give the driver maximum visibility. 

Given the changes in city centre retailing, especially the number of 'local' 'metro' & 'neighborhood' shops, and on-line retailing, this seems like an idea whose time has come.  Just think of the difference to Morningside Road and Leith Walk if big supermarket delivery vehicles, John Lewis, B&Q etc were not trundling up and down every day?  Not to mention the benefits of aggregating orders so that Rose Street was not a complete clutter of vans in the mornings before 10.30?  Or that you could actually see the cycle/bus lane in Forest Road? 

I don't want to hear another politician saying 'even one fatality is too many'. Let's move on from the platitudes and actually learn from places where the politicians don't have to say this.


Update: coaches transporting tourists are also a menace - an Edinburgh cyclist ended up underneath one on Tuesday.  Amazingly, he survived.  Both coaches and HGVs have similar issues.  Not just massive blind spots, but drivers whose positioning is up and away from the road

Another Update:  just saw this report from the BBC about proposals to redesign lorry cabs so as to improve their visibility - interesting. 

Moving the goal posts...

In the Cycling Action Plan of 2010   the Scottish government considered whether or not strict liability should be adopted, noting that

"the differences in laws between the UK and continental European countries have often been cited by cyclists as the main reason cyclists on the continent enjoy greater protection. "(Section 5.5)

They went on to note 

"However, this has often been combined with a number of other measures such as increased investment in cycle infrastructure so it will be difficult to isolate one particular factor influencing why these countries have higher cycling levels than the UK". 

But when they came back to us last week with the CAPS 'refresh', oddly enough, they didn't say we've decided that it's the infrastructure that makes the difference, so we'll be investing in infrastructure. Nor did they say strict liability does make a difference, so we'll be moving to change our legal framework.  No, they claimed:

"The available data does not supply robust evidence of a direct causal link between strict liability legislation to levels of cycling and KSIs (killed and seriously injured statistics), when countries like the UK and Ireland are clearly reducing fatalities in cyclists and all other road users without strict liability legislation in place." (my emphasis) pp21

But, as the data released in recent days in both Scotland and England has shown, KSI rates may be falling for all users, but not for vulnerable road users, and certainly not for cyclists (see here and my previous blogs)

The problem with moving the goalposts is that you might just score an own-goal by mistake.

If the data doesn't back up the Minister's contentions,  then suggesting that even more can be achieved by ensuring road users are aware of the Highway Code and 'be considerate' of each other, is not evidence-based policy-making. This surely takes us back to the original premise in the CAPS study - either Strict Liability or infrastructure? or - more likely - both.

Lies, damn lies, and targets

Last week the Scottish government released the latest data on serious injuries on Scotland's roads.   The headline on the Ministerial statement that accompanied the data release claimed that "Scottish road casualty statistics moving in right direction" on the basis that "the number of fatalities on Scotland’s roads are down 8% since 2011, with the total number of road casualties down by 2% to the lowest figure ever recorded" Oddly, quite a lot of people didn't agree with him, because if you looked a bit more closely at the data, it became clear that while fewer motorists were being killed or seriously injured, the numbers were going in the opposite direction for cyclists, and more pedestrians were also killed.  The Minister's statement in fact had no numbers at all for vulnerable road users, while the figures in the data release it accompanied highlighted that there were 9% more casualties in 2012 than 2011.  

However,  the data is much worse than this.  In comparison to their baseline data from 2004-2008, there's been a 17% rise in cyclists killed or seriously injured (KSI) on built-up roads and 34% on rural roads.  

Over at Pedal on Parliament, we pointed out that this data didn't seem to back up his claim the week before, that there was no need to strict liability, because accident rates were already dropping. 

But there is a broader issue at stake.  The government has 'targets' for making roads safer.  They measure these by looking at  'people killed or seriously injured' and 'children killed or seriously injured, and deep in some excel files, they work out what the numbers would be if they met their targets.  The the 'target' for how many cyclists would be seriously injured is 92, but in fact there were 167.  Meaning that they missed their target by 81%.*  

I'm not convinced that we should have government by 'targets', but if we're going to set targets, and collect data, surely we should be looking at targets for vulnerable road users separately from motorists?  Not just because the issues are different but because keeping that data at the aggregate level masks what's really going on.  The statistics don't lie, it just depends on how you look at them, and how you present them. 

If rates for some road users are going up and others are going down -- more than can be explained by increased rates of cycling -- then we need to ask why.   

The only reason for setting targets is so that policy can be designed to address the specific issues needed to make a change.  So, if we had a target to bring down the rates of pedestrian and cyclist KSIs, we'd need to think what interventions could achieve this most effectively. 

And that's a discussion we really need to have.  

*corrected 1/7/2013 after error pointed out via twitter.