South Croydon Railway Station - CLOSED

Well you can't keep a half decent cycle facility for long in Croydon. It soon turns into crap.

This path has now been closed. The bottom end of the car park is now entirely given over to the storage of railway equipment, so at the point where you are supposed to get off the track in to the car park it is blocked.

(as it was when open)


And just to emphasise the point, the sign which was pointing in the wrong direction has been removed.

(before the sign was removed)


Google Earth Image

--------------------------------------------------
cycling, cycle path, croydon

Climate Bike Ride 2008

Reaching the end of the Climate Change Bike Ride - Featuring Des Kay and his wonderful contraption.



--------------------------------------------------
cycling, Des Kay

Bonkers Boris slashes cycle funding

From the Guardian

The Green party in the London assembly accused the Tory mayor of lacking "backbone" by putting £11.1m into traffic signals for London motorists while cutting the LCN+ budget.

Jenny Jones, one of two green party members on the London assembly, said Johnson's budget allocation would please motorists at the expense of cyclists.

"The mayor has cut £10m off the budget for cycle lanes in London and used the money to help fund a new £11m budget for traffic light rephasing. This might well please a few motorists who want to get through red lights faster, but it is a stab in the back for cyclists in London," Jones said.

"Local cyclists have spent the last three years working on schemes, often having to overcome the resistance of reluctant traffic engineers. What we needed this year was a mayor with some backbone and the desire to remove the physical barriers to cycling in London. The cycling mayor was meant to be on their side, yet he has now halved the funding for London's biggest cycling scheme."

--------------------------------------------------
cycling

South Croydon Railway Station Car Park

Shock news, there's a new wide, tarmacked, well lit shared use cycle path in Croydon which isn't bad at all (well not that bad anyway).



It starts at Coombe Road, by the railway bridge, where the sign clearly shows it as a shared use cycle path to the railway station.

Shame the sign is pointing in exactly the wrong direction.



It is a wide tarmacked path, that looks more like an access road.



It is very well lit.



But rather strangely signed.



With no signs at all in the opposite direction



Bikes are then directed into the new, vastly enlarged 80 spaces car park, the real reason for the development.



And if you approach the path from the station direction, you could be forgiven for thinking there was no cycle path at all.



It is a great improvement to the footpath, but unlikely to be a particularly popular cycle path, and as for trying to cross Coombe Road, there is no crossing anywhere along this stretch, despite many years of campaigning from local residents.

Google Earth Image - taken before the path was built

--------------------------------------------------
cycling, cycle path, croydon

Des Kay wins Critical Mass Legal Case

Des Kay and FoE deserve a vote of thanks for perusing this case all the way to the house of lords.



BBC "Impromptu cyclists win legal case"

Judgments -Kay (FC) (Appellant) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (Respondent)

--------------------------------------------------
cycling, critical mass

"What Boris has against London’s cyclists?"

A great piece of analysis from Boris Watch showing how the mayor seems determined to make London less safe for cycling...

He hasn’t answered the question. He’s dodged, ducked, dived, dipped and then dodged again, for good measure. He’s not offered up any plausible explanation for what was either a direct lie or the result of listening to and believing someone who was lying. I wonder why.

As for the facts put forward, there’s a glaring lacuna in there that renders this answer not only evasive but actually misleading. Basically, you can’t compare artic and non-artic buses by vehicle kilometre and use the results unaltered. It’s intellectually dishonest and here’s why:

We’ve seen from the London Travelwatch document that in order to maintain passenger capacity on debendification you need 40-50% more buses (in fact 75 bendies become 117 non-articulated buses on the first three routes, for a total increase of 56%, because the 507 and 521 are special cases). Presumably, if the bendy casualty rate is really only 32-36% more, then scrapping bendies and replacing them with 56% more non-bendy buses will *increase* the casualty rate and be less safe for cyclists. Let’s do the maths on a simple example:

Say intensive non-bendy route X has 10 collisions with cyclists per year and intensive bendy route Y, with the same number of vehicle km operated, and according to the Boris Ratio, 13 collisions per year. Total: 23 collisions.

Now, we debendify route Y, increasing vehicle kilometres by 50%, but reducing the casualty rate. We now have 13/1.3*1.5 = 15 collisions per year, for 25 collisions in total, so we’ve made the bus network about 8 or 9% less safe for cyclists.

It can be seen from this that no matter how the figures are dressed up and spun, the extra casualty rate on bendies has to be below the replacement bus rate, otherwise you end up injuring more cyclists.

I ask myself what Boris has against London’s cyclists? He seems to favour a lot of projects that actively harm them.

--------------------------------------------------
cycling

Croydon Council Are Truly Crap

Back in February I wrote an optimistic post titled Sign of Improvements..., regarding this sign.



Six months later the roadworks were still "underway", and Jim managed to get this sorry story of delay and incompetence into the Croydon Advertiser.


Now we are reaching the end of the year and the scheme has simply ground to a halt. It seems that Croydon Council has just given up, and the faded sign may sit here, along with the roadworks, well into the new year.



Satellite Image

--------------------------------------------------
cycling, croydon

Climate Bike Ride 2008

Saturday 6 December 2008

Assemble 10.30 am Lincolns Inn Fields for a mass bike ride around Central London joining up with the National Climate March at Grosvenor Square.

There will be three stops on the route:
• Outside Greenergy, 198 High Holborn – for an agrofuels protest organised by Biofuelswatch
• Outside E.On 100 Pall Mall – for a speaker on NO NEW COAL
• Outside the Department of Transport – for a speaker on sustainable transport

All welcome.

Decorate your bikes. Bring whistles. Bring music.

Web site

Southville Roads and other gems

A couple of recommendations from the web...

Southville Roads is a fresh look at parking - particularly the art of pavement parking in the Southville area of Bristol.



This came via The Green Bristol Blog which is helping fight the desecration of the Bristol to Bath cycle path.



It is such a shame that Croydon lacks the radical activism found in places like Bristol and Brighton, mind you that would be no guarantee of decent conditions for cycling...

Cycling is safer on the Streets

From Principles of cycle planning by John Franklin

A statement by the Austrian government makes the point: "Most bicycle accident victims are older people and children. They are put at risk by the complexity of cycle paths on the one hand and on the other hand by their over-confidence that their safety on cycle paths is substantially greater than on the road.

At the international Velo City conference in Munich this year, a Swiss delegate described how there has been a major shift in his country from accommodating cyclists separately to mixing cyclists with traffic, with changes to the road environment as necessary. This has led to big increases in cycling. The mayors of Munich, Brussels, Copenhagen and Paris each explicitly stated how they wanted cycling back on their streets. And even a speaker from the Netherlands defined 'cycle-friendly cities' as those with as few special facilities for cyclists as possible.

We don't need cycle facilities, we need streets which are safe for cycling.

--------------------------------------------------
cycling, cycle lane, cycle path, cycle track