Newsletter December 2024

City of London

More changes are coming to the City of London with Bank Junction now under threat, and a proposed LTN and new cycleway.

The consultation has just closed on a new Healthy Neighbourhood in the Barbican area and we'll await the response.

City of London also has a consultation on Leadenhall Street and a new high-quality east-to-west cycle route. Deadline to respond is 9 February.

LCC will be sharing thoughts on the scheme in the new year and Jon Stone has already made some good points on Twitter:
“good start but needs:

• Two way cycle track on Queen Victoria St should connect to C6 at Blackfriars without splitting
• Needs a bus gate on Leadenhall St (or protected lanes) as it's too busy for a cycleway
•  Westbound cycle lane on Aldgate High St needed too”

Haringey

Great news from neighbouring borough Haringey, where the cabinet have just voted to make all three trialled LTNs permanent, following the recommendations from Director for Environment reports that show LTN traffic has dropped 51–66%, while boundary road traffic has risen by just 2–6%; and two-year collision data shows cuts in collisions both inside the LTNs and on boundary roads. Watch Cllr Mike Hakata talk about the positive impact of these LTNs.

LCC Campaigning Awards

We would like to congratulate Anthony Christofi and the Camden Transport Design Team for their Highly Commended award at the recent LCC AGM and Awards ceremony. They received the award in recognition of their work across Camden with particular appreciation of the fabulous new cycling provision at Holborn; see the LCC video for the scheme here.

We also congratulate our committee colleagues Suzanne Weller and John Chamberlain (pictured) for their Hands of Friendship Award, given in recognition of those who have “reached beyond their LCC group to collaborate with other organisations or community groups in their borough” – awarded for their excellent work with a local GP practice. See here for a recap of the LCC awards.

Memorial for George Coulouris

A memorial was held for our colleague George Coulouris on Friday 6 December, attended by many from the LCC cycling community, along with friends, family and colleagues from the world of computer innovation.

George's partner, Jean, provided a lengthy and entertaining history of their life together with many surprising facts including George's broad range of interests: predicting personal computing would transform society and working on an early version of the UNIX computer system, “…taken and used by someone in California”, to their travels to China, playing the cello, and of course travelling around France and elsewhere in Europe on a foldable tandem George designed.

George leaves a huge legacy – and lasting inspiration from his lifelong commitment and gentle tenacity; he will be missed greatly.

• Peter Norton tweets about The National Conference on Street & Highway Safety in Washington hosted by Herbert Hoover 100 years ago. Hoover's drafted public statement called the moving automobile “a tremendous and deadly instrument of power” with “a capacity for destruction, equal to any deadly weapon” but motordom persuaded him to change his tune.

• In 2023, Tom Haines-Doran explained how Britain's addiction to cars is built on a financial house of cards. 50% of a car's value is never actually paid off in a repeated cycle of new cars and new PCP deals. More recently, he looks at How car finance is holding back a just transition.

• The ‘Hill of Hysteria' is how new LCC trustee, Natalie Lindsay,⁩ describes the familiar trend of noise that builds from a minority against measures to improve public space and enable safer cycling and walking. Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo continues to feel the fear and do it anyway, as the city will have removed 60,000 parking spaces and replaced them with trees by 2030 – alongside “oasis squares” in each arrondissement, to provide shade and lower air temperatures. Paris will also create 300 School Streets by 2026 with 180 installed so far.

• As the government is poised to start building not just new houses but entire new towns, will it avoid its predecessors’ mistakes that locked in car-dependency by building homes far away from where people needed to get to? Create Streets and Britain Remade recommend “England’s new towns being walkable and green… and not built on national landscapes, flood plains, or SSSIs; also with good public transport links – our daily needs all being close to our homes. This would allow “more people to walk, or cycle with pleasure, more of the time”.

• From the Great Stink to the Great Smog, Bazalgette’s sewer system and the 1956 Clean Air Act were “testaments to the unflinching conviction of past leaders in tackling a century of London’s pollution problems head-on” wrote Phineas Harper in 2023. But will these be terms to apply to the legacies of Sadiq Khan and his former deputy Heidi Alexander, the new Minister for Transport? Will they acknowledge the unique opportunity that exists to align in a vision for London and the rest of the UK, and act to reduce the single-occupant car’s consumption of space, land, resources and energy?

Many thanks and warm wishes for the festive season,

Camden Cyclists