Walk, Cycle or Die: what should the NHS do?

Gven the Daily Mail
What about the NHS? What are they going to do without waiting for the Daily Mail to become "enlightened".

Freewheeler used to criticise the NHS in Waltham Forest for being car-sick. That's pretty common round the country.

1. They implicitly encourage their staff to drive in, by providing infrastructure to enable this.
2. They implicitly discourage their staff from driving in by providing shit cycling infrastructure.

The shit infrastructure goes further than the hospital site -the adding of an extra lane at the A38/A4174 Airbus roundabout is to cope with the extra traffic of the expanded Southmead hospital. The NHS now knows that driving is bad for the long term health of the patient, yet they aren't translating that into actions on the ground.

Anyone who has tried to park a bicycle at a Bristol/S Gloucs hospital will know they will have to trudge round looking for an obscure bike park which will be:  in an random corner of the site,uncovered, blatantly insecure and not even well signed.

Supermarkets with eight bike stands in front of their supermarket entrance alongside a 500+ car parking area have better bike parking facilities than most hospitals, as they have eight bike stands somewhere useful.

In Bristol, The BRI is pretty awful: one row of bike stands 6? in a well known theft zone. That's all. There's also a four storey staff car park round the corner and various other parking zones nearby. Not much visitor parking, but once all the staff parking is taken care of, there's little room.

Frenchay? It was pretty bad too. Apparently they were looking at a scheme whereby the amount staff paid to park was proportional to your salary: the more you earned, the more it cost. That's a nice idea. Frenchay also suffered from: no secure bike parking, minimal bus access. Regular patients knew the best tactic was to park in a nearby street and walk in. 

Southville -which is expanding as Frenchay gets shut down- will be test for Bristol and the North Fringe. Will it discourage driving by staff and patients, or will it encourage it.

The roundabout fiasco sounds like they aren't trying to discourage it, not matter what they say.

Yet a hospital staff should be the ideal place for the NHS and NICE to see if they could effect change in UK driver's habits

They NHS has an opportunity to change the reward scheme for transportation choices -in a way that it lacks for all other employers. 

It could

1. Provide secure and convenient bike parking for staff, where secure means "your bike and its lights will be there when you get back", convenient: closer to your office/place of work than any car parking. Some electric charge points could be good tool
2. Provide changing and shower facilities for staff. Yes, this is just icing on the cake, but it makes cycling more acceptable amongst colleagues -and if you live in Bristol, you will know about getting wet on the commute. You need somewhere to dry your wet things.
3. Provide convenient and secure-ish parking for visitors. Here, covered, near the entrance parking with good lighting and CCTV coverage is what to hope for. You want every patient going to the hospital to see the extended bike park even closer to the entrance than the disabled parking bays for the heavy smokers.
4. Provide safe cycle access to the hospital premises.
5. Provide information and assistance on cycling to work. Loan electric bikes, adult 1:1 cycle training  which covers the route from  home to work -these can come after the infrastructure.
6. Provide information to patients on cycling to the hospital. Today: little leaflets on parking and public transport. Nothing about cycling. An outline map of the approaches to the hospital, with details on how this connects to the rest of the city, could be good here.
7. Provice disincentives to driving. For staff, salary-proportional parking fees. For patients, pay to park. There's complications there: not just the disabled patients, but the long-visit day patients on dialysis, chemotherapy, etc. You can't expect them to pay a lot, or cycle in. At the same time, you don't want the Scottish vote-seeking model "free hospital parking". 

The safe cycle access is critical. Staff will come on the same routes regularly, so you need non-leisure routes that aren't too indirect, slow or unsafe. The development of these access routes could be an integral part of hospital development. Not meaningless 'we have a cycle plan' pieces of paper, not 'some S106 cash for some shared pavement', but "make increasing the percentage of cycling staff and patients a short-term goal. Short term, because failures and success needs to be visible within a year, to stop you pretending that 'by 2020 15% will cycle', when nothing is happening towards that goal. 

How is southmead coming close to this. It isn't.

• A new 200 place car park.
• A public transport plan that  says "cycling initiatives" but allocates no money or time to them
• A web site that does mention the 500+ parking spaces, .
• A 'find us' web page that is proud of "ample patient and visitor parking."
• A PDF site map that does show some walking/cycling only routes, but doesn't show bike parking on the site map, and whose surrounding street map points to M4/M5 over any nearby bike routes
• A transport plan that does promise to care about walking and cycling.

And, elsewhere:

How will you make it easier to get to Southmead?

The Trust has agreed to pay £1.5 million for improvements to public transport and almost another £1 million for improvements to road junctions in Bristol and South Gloucestershire. Work is underway between the Trust and the local councils.  A Joint Officers Transport Group has been established to lead this work and this will include identifying how the Trust’s public transport investment should best be spent in order to enable as many people as possible to get to the hospital by bus. An accessibility study has been produced which helps to inform these discussions.  It will also finalise proposals for how the road infrastructure funding will be invested and ensure there is appropriate provision for those who may come to the site by bicycle or on foot.

See that?  £1 million for improvements to road junctions. And a footnote about appropriate provision for those who may come to the site by bicycle or on foot. As if that will be a special case that they mustn't forget about -not the way they expect most of their staff and many of their patients to come by.

The NHS -if they want to fix society, they should look in the mirror first.

Walk, Cycle or Die: the Daily Mail vs the NHS

The Daily Mail loves its scare story, "lettuce gives you cancer", but one time there is something with a clear cut connection between action (driving everywhere) and outcome (10 years off your life), the DM refuses to acknowledge this, instead going for "Nanny State to increase parking costs".

If the DM news crew though it through -and believed the NHS reports- then they'd realise that shortening the lives of daily mail readers is bad for their long term income plans, unless they plan to "hook" another generation of daily mail readers. The demographics of printed press sales mean that isn't going to happen -unless they can convert this to page hits of people that don't use flashblock and adblock in their browsers, then even their web site's business plan is weak.

It should be in the DM's interest to get its readers to do some exercise, unless there's another goal. What? Well, there's the advertising revenue to think of; all the Car adverts. That hasn't stopped the Times.

It's most likely that the DM needs their agenda "europe to ban cheddar cheese", "asylum seekers groom teenage girls for sex", to sell papers. If there weren't scare stories on the headline, (or royalty joy stories), then people would leave the DM copies on the stalls as the newsagent, and so their paper sales -the ones they depend on the most- would fall.

That's something to consider as a tactic -if they could be switched into treating travesties of justice by law-breaking lorry drivers as something to put on the front page, then maybe they'd start to get through to an audience which, like it or not, represent a large proportion of suburban England (no comment on Wales, Scotland, NI),  But the DM isn't going to do that unless they think their audience would care -and if they don't, they won't. Maybe the tactic is that their children, and their grandchildren cycle.

Fucked by Justice

What happened in the courts today shows that Britain thinks cyclists are expendable; a slight inconvenience for drivers. Door one when you illegally tinted your windows? You won't even get enough of a conviction to see your premiums go up.

As for the lorry driver: on the phone, not looking, yet "careless?". You don't kill someone through carelessness. Careless is forgetting where you left your keys.

Even he must have known he did something wrong -because he lied about being on the phone. He knew he should have been looking -after the fact.

Meanwhile, over in Cambridge, the police are cracking down on cyclists who cycle on the pavement.

Everyone should buy a copy of the Times tomorrow -not just  to see what they print, but to show your support for their campaign.

And then what? If justice is broken -how do we fix it?

Everyone who cycles needs to go to their local "police meets community" meetings. They may seem a waste of time -but that's what directs police resources -and nowadays that means against cyclists.

You all need to go, and get your needs addressed, but subtly, in a way that even the cyclist-haters can come round to

1. "I think school parents park really dangerously round school XYZ". If you do the school run by bike, you'll fear actually arriving near the school, and of course it's just as bad walking. Make clear that pedestrian safety is one of your concerns, so you can't be boxed as "a cyclist"
2. "Speeding cars mean I can't cross roads safely". Again, pedestrian safety. How can the anti pavement cyclists complain there.
3. Drivers on phones, especially texting, nearly hit me at (cite some recent example, especially at a zebra crossing".
4. Cars don't stop for me at zebra crossings; run predestrian lights at junction XYZ. Again, cite places where this happens.

Can you see the commonality. Instead of complaining about the actions that endanger you on a bike, the actions that endanger everyone on foot. That stops it being lawbreaking cyclists unfit to complain "until they get their own house in order",  but instead people who walk round the city -proper citizens, yet ones who still get treated like shit in a society that places driving above all else.

What else? 

Press coverage. This could maybe, just maybe, be something to bring the Daily Mail and its readers around. Yes they hate cyclists, yes they want to ban them from the streets, but they also believe criminals should get what they deserve. A lorry driver (from abroad!) who leaves a woman in hospital for life pays a few thousand pounds and will be driving -on the phone again- within a year. Even they could resent that. 

But how to get the Daily Mail to even mention it. That's the next challenge. And a hard one.

£20 million? You couldn't build a roundabout for that!

The government has somewhere in the trouser pockets of the transport secretary managed to find a few million pounds to stop the cyclists complaining.

They'll probably have to put off adding an extra lane on a motorway slip way for three months or something similar.

What does that 20 million quid say about britain today?

1. It was portrayed as "for cyclists" and for "cycling', not "for the country"
2. No range-rover driving CBI spokesman (it would be a man) turned up to say this would be a boost for the economy, the way they do for roads. 
3. Claims that this would somehow make britain a better place to cycle were accepted by the press, rather than greeted with ridicule and laughter.

 This shows a key problem, cycling is viewed as "for others". CBI  businessmen believe that they and their employees need more roads to address congestion. Politicians view it as "for them" and not for the country. As for the press, they are either docile and naive or they saw through the bullshit but decided not to call them out on it.

If there is one thing to be grateful for: the daily mail didn't denounce it as a war-on-motorists action. No, they saved that vitriol for the NICE "walk, cycle or die" proposal (that's a good phrase -expect a followup article on it).

No doubt the people that will pick up on it will be the fuckwits who, to this day, comment on the Bristol paper's articles with anti cycling rants saying "£27 million wasted on lycra louts". Certainly, the portion of that spent in S gloucs was a waste -but some of the things they did in Bristol were good. It's just even there: nobody was prepared to take road space away from cars in the city centre; nobody prepared to to block off roads to motor traffic. And if they weren't prepared to do that in the city, well, S Gloucs was fucked from the outset.

Which shows problem #2 with the funding: you can do good things with money for cycling, or you can

• Waste it on bluewash paint jobs, of which the London CS routes are the key example. 70 million for nothing.
• Fritter it away on hi-viz giveways, leisure route maps and "personal journey consultants" who show you how it's easy to get to your destination by bike, -and you will probably reach it alive.

In the cycling world, that means there are two problems

1. Getting the funding needed to make our cities and suburbs safe to cycle around.
2. Getting cycle facilities designed that aren't so fucking useless that their sole purpose is to make the "cycling facility of the month" web page.

The CEoGB is pushing hard for #2, but you can see that TfL don't fully understand it. They need to really want to do good cycling facilities, rather than be a petrolhead who views bicycles as things that should be pushed to the side with pedestrians.

Funding? That's going to need all of us to stand up and say "you are taking the fucking piss".

Every few months, the fuel duty campaigners start their whining again, blackmailing politicians into giving them more than the cycle campaigners ever, ever see. We need to be as noisy, and we need to get listened to.

Why have scotland's roads got more lethal for pedestrians?

The scottish road statistics are out, and behind the "roads are getting safer" claims both walking and cycling has got more dangerous, as magnatom shows. This increase in ped/cyclist deaths is merely hidden by a drop in car deaths (gradual retirement of non-airbag, non-ABS fleet?)

The increase in pedestrian KSI is something to draw out.

If it was just an increasing in cyclist KSI, one could discount it by saying "due to an increase in inexperienced cyclists". One could also blame bikes that are more dangerous (fixed wheel) than -the official S Gloucs recommend cycle path bike, an MTB with disk brakes and enough front travel to handle potholes and 20cm drops in the paths.

You can't do so much victim blaming the pedestrians. Unless there has been a surge in walking, something else is happening.

Here are some possibilites and ways to test them.

Hypothesis	Test
More pedestrians -cost of fuel and public transport	any gathered pedestrian counts.
Urban walking has somehow got more dangerous	Increase in percentage KSI in urban/rural environment, assuming constant pedestrian count
increase in speed after cameras removed	turn cameras on but don't issue tickets -just #of vehicles speeding in town/country roads
drivers on phone	look at phone records after KSI; survey percentage of drivers phoning or texting in urban & rural environments.
drivers texting	consult phone records (and phone)
pedestrians on phone or texting	again: phone records & sampling of pedestrian numbers.
bad weather	compare KSI stats on wet days vs dry days at same time of year/day of week.
Risk compensation of newer cars	Compare change by car model/year from previous year of KSI statistics.

All these are testable -if not in 2011, from now. Cameras can measure the #of speeding cars in an area, correlated with KSI to show if it is an increase in speed, or some other factor.


There's another hypothesis: increase in driving kilometres, but that's already decreasing. Maybe a reduction in car traffic increases speed by reducing congestion.

The two recent trends are: better cars possibly triggering risk compensation, and a growth in phone and texting use.

Phone and text use can be gathered after any RTC -the police can sieze the phone and look for half-competed texts in the drafts folder; phone records will show texts sent and received, phone calls (recent and active). The mobile phone companies will also have records of web requests  and emails made at the time of any crash, though not the content of encrypted communications (mail could be background updates, as facebook and twitter activity could be).


Without attempts to collect these statistics, the reasons for the 6% increase in KSI numbers cannot be determined -and hence cannot be fixed.

There is no evidence that Transport for Scotland are doing this -and until then the causes are guesswork.

If the Pedal on Parliament people want to push for something in the statistics gathering, this is what they should be thinking of -especially the gathering of phone/text data from both drivers and pedestrians.

(side note: cyclist texting/phoning is much rarer than driving; the increase there is unlikely to be due to a rise in cyclists using phones. The other hypothesis list may apply to the increase there -or there may be other causes).

pricing roads and cities

This week the government is wheeling out the mad-think-tank idiots -the ones who no doubt blame the rail privatisation failure for "not going far enough", and now they are talking about privatising roads, presumably pavements too.

This is because the government is publishing something on car tax changing that is proposing two tiers of tax

• Urban roads, country roads and most A roads.
• Premium: All roads, including motorways and "some" A roads.

The "premium" deal will fund motorway "improvements".

This is bollocks for anyone who drives, as the "value" edition will mean you can never, ever, ever drive on a motorway. You may not get stuck on the M4 every weekday to have the option of using a motorway on a summer weekend. No, most car owners except for people who live in the scottish highlands will end up with the premium car tax.

It's like the BBC license tax that use to have a B&W option as well as colour: now everyone except for a very, very few all has a colour license.

This seems just like a tax increase then -but it's worse. It's the plan to fund a new generation of road improvements "to kick start the economy".

Those private-financed-motorway lanes? Here's the funding. Those new motorway exits? Here's the funding. The south coat m-way? The oxford-cambridge m-way? Here comes the money.

The government will hypothecate the motorway premium to building new motorways and expanding existing ones. This will generate extra traffic anywhere near the motorways, whose costs will be borne by everyone else.

This thinking shows how fucking simple-minded the DfT is. all they give a fuck about is how much it costs to keep motorways working. What the government doesn't give a fuck about is in-city congestion. It is in the cities that the external costs of driving are the highest -and borne by the residents, the pedestrians, the cyclists, the public transport users.

Anyone who drives on a motorway creates congestion -a cost imposed on everyone else on the motorway; everyone gets held up and the congestion costs are shared. (there's pollution, fuel consumption, the impact of oil imports on the UK economy of course)

In a city, the space taken up by each car on the move could be used much more efficiently: bus lanes, segregated bike paths, pedestrian/bike areas. The pollution caused by everyone sitting in traffic jams makes the cities worse places to live, the parking spaces they take up are where our segregated bike paths should go.

Would an inner-city car tax surplus work? No, still bollocks. Because per-use charging is the only way to make people change their actions. Once you've paid for an m-way pass, you may as well drive on them whenever you need to. There's no financial incentive not to. 

Per-use charging encourages people to make decisions based on the individual cost & benefits of that single choice. That's motorway and road tolls -though that may just push vehicles onto the roads we cyclists try to survive on. In town, a congestion charge used to fund public transport, cycling improvements and traffic mitigation policies would force every car commuter to consider their options every day. If those fees changes based on time of day, you'd even level out peak hour traffic.

A premium motorway-edition car tax will do nothing at all to improve our cities. All it will do is create unrealistic expectations in the people who pay it.

Why red paint on a road is such a waste of money

The reviewing of the Gilbert Road history makes a key point to the members of the  People's Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire:

Painting red strips at the edge of the road is not only a waste of money -it is a dangerous waste of money.

Why does any money get spent on cycling facilities? It's not out of the goodness of the heart of politicians, who have many other things to do with it.

1. Safety: People -cycling campaigners and voters are demanding facilities to improve cycling.
2. Take-up: A goal has been set (locally or centrally) to increase the number of cyclists, to achieve modal shift. 

Red paint on the road does not achieve goal #1, hence #2, take-up of cycling falls by the wayside.

Why doesn't red paint achieve cycling safety. Because it is fucking useless.

1. It often goes up in the door-zone, the place where you don't want to cycle.
2. If it goes up alongside a pavement, irrespective of what no parking signs go up, selfish lazy wankers who can't walk more than two feet to their destination will park there. Usually they get away with it from a society that thinks it is acceptable.
3. Motor vehicles zip by you fast if you are naive enough to cycle in the paint zone.
4. If you cycle out of the paint zone, out of the door zone, you get the cars sounding their horns, the people complaining the cyclists don't use the facilities. In the worst case, you  get the councillors saying the cyclists don't deserve any more facilities because they don't use the shit stuff they've been given. 
5. It's not the straight road stretches that are that dangerous -if they are, a 20 mph zone helps. 
6. What is dangerous -and which the red paint never does anything about- is crossing junctions safely. Often the red paint goes away just before you get to a roundabout, to some four way crossing, to somewhere where you need the acceleration of Cavendish or Grimpel to get across the main road. That's not just some road crossing -many of the "cycle path" crossings of junctions do the same. 

People who cycle will continue to do it, either in the red door zone or, if sensible, in the piss-off-driver zone, and hope to get over the junctions safely. Having cyclist thighs and experience helps them, which is why the vehicular-cycling-only group are usually fit males. Women, kids, they don't have the edge or the hormones.

People who don't cycle -remember that goal #2, take-up- won't, because they try that red line, feel the cars going past, then discover their local council has abandoned them at the junction. Once they get over it, they say "never again", and don't. The bicycle only comes out on the leisure routes, routes the council is happy to give out brochures on -not once wondering why the leisure routes are the only places that you see families on bicycles -families that drive there.

Because red-paint-roads don't achieve safety and hence modal-shift, there is no fucking point wasting any money on them. Because they take away money and time that could make cycling safer. Even ignoring segregated routes, it could be spent making roundabouts and other junctions safer for people cycling on roads -something TfL is clearly failing to do. 

Cycle campaigning groups must make it clear that red-paint achieves nothing. If you see the proposals, ask what the goals are -safety and modal shift- and make clear they don't achieve them. Then say "what can you do that makes things safe and so encourages take-up"

If a council cannot make the roads safe for cycling -and they acknowledge that fact using words like "flow", then that leaves them with only one alternative: safe, segregated routes with safe crossings of junctions. 

It's that junction crossing which is the thing to watch out for. It's why the vehicular cycling advocates have got it right -cycling over a roundabout offers better rights of way than hiding in the traffic islands waiting for a gap. Except neither are safe -which is why both have to go. 

Which raises the question: is the CTC really the Popular Cycling Front of S Gloucs: the committee people who cycle down the rounds, sprint over the junctions, and believe it is their inalienable right to die on an A-road after a transit van driven by a git on a mobile runs into them saying "they just came out of nowhere."

We have to stop compromising on shit paint that does nothing. Either a facility makes cycling safer, achieving modal shift or it doesn't. If it doesn't: there is no fucking point doing it.