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Even if there is a ‘ten-fold increase’ in cycling (which there isn’t), central London is already over-provided with lanes. How do I know? Because the crazy-golf chutes are generally empty. Why? First, because the lanes jump around all over the place. They disgorge the law-abiding into dangerous intersections. And secondly, you can’t overtake. Everybody knows that half the cyclists in London think they are in a race. Bicycle accidents increased by 57 per cent after the introduction of the Tavistock-Torrington Place lane. Every sane cyclist already uses the back roads for their daily commute.
Motorised traffic won’t diminish. It will head for these back roads. (Exactly as I did.) It may not mount the pavements and zip up one-way streets like a self-respecting bicycle boy, but it will pollute the very places where central Londoners live. We only have a rush hour because central London councils want one. A good proportion of their housing stock remains workplace, stuffed with commuting lawyers and accountants. They have used Article Four directions to prevent anyone turning it back into dwellings. The windfall from business rates means that they prefer old-fashioned zoning.
The most effective planet-saving reforms would be to prevent commercial ‘centres’ and to spread ‘live-work’ across the entirety of London. Instead, we are once again pursuing outmoded and outdated ‘visions’. (Or ‘fantasies’, as London-wide protests by ordinary working people are calling them.) Our capital is a success because people inhabit it. There is no commercial ghetto rotting away, as in so many British cities. People live right by the largest shopping centres. A few years ago, Khan wanted to pedestrianise Oxford Street. If that had happened, every diesel-powered vehicle that rumbles along it would have gone to pump out its fumes into the back streets where children sleep. He was thwarted by the Marylebone Association, who went to the voters on this single issue.
So if Londoners want to get rid of those who think that a pandemic gives them an excuse to re-order their ten square miles of local borough and save the entire planet, then elect them out. Most of them are hanging on by less than a hundred votes.
But don’t blame the Mayor alone for this failed scheme. After spending oodles of cash, he has now decided to open the Euston Road again. It was all just ‘an experiment’. Nobody wanted to bike in his lane.
Never mind. His cause has been embraced by local councils. The Gray’s Inn Road is next up for works.
Because you read about covid
Also by Griff Rhys Jones
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