With the CIOB’s London location recently moving from Broadway in St James’s to more centrally located Kingsway, I occasionally choose to take the bus from Waterloo up to Kingsway, near Aldwych. This is usually the case if the weather is somewhat inclement.
It’s a nerve-wracking experience. When is a bus lane not a bus lane? When the bus lane is on Waterloo Bridge northbound, and overwhelmed with bikes. The poor bus drivers are on a hiding to nothing and it is surprising that there are not more accidents.
Even walking across the bridge, it is quite apparent how inadequate are the measures to separate the various bits of traffic. No end of red routes, blue routes and whatever other colour routes can hide a dangerous situation. Where the kerb is shared between buses and bikes it can get quite ugly.
"It would be vastly different to the stuff I get to see at the junction of the Strand, Aldwych and Waterloo Bridge, where you have cyclists, pedestrians and road traffic jostling for every inch of space and with carnage avoided more by luck than judgement."
I do have some sympathy for cyclists, having lost two acquaintances in cycling accidents. I also had a colleague suffer really bad injuries as a pedestrian caused by a hit and run cyclist.
With most of central London’s roads incapable of widening, then maybe the answer is purpose-built cycleways away from the road. Unlike other countries where such separation is relatively easy because of the lack of space constraints, there is scope – particularly in London – for something really different.
The growth in tall towers forecast cries out for them to be linked by a series of elevated cycleways and pathways similar to the walkways around much of downtown Hong Kong that keep you above the traffic. They may not always offer direct routes but would offer a higher level of safety.
It would be vastly different to the stuff I get to see at the junction of the Strand, Aldwych and Waterloo Bridge, where you have cyclists, pedestrians and road traffic jostling for every inch of space and with carnage avoided more by luck than judgement.
The downside is that it may not look very tidy having to retrofit some of this but if elevated cycleways were designed into schemes from the start it would be possible to satisfy both function and form. The extra cost would be a small price to pay and could be funded in part by cyclists through a bike tax.
Order might also be restored if humans and human nature were removed from the equation. If driverless cars ever become a reality I fail to see how you could integrate cyclists because the car sensors would shut down the cars. Nor do I see much of a market for riderless bikes, however rationally they might behave.
