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++ A year ago, TfL replaced Westminster City Council as the highway authority for Oxford Street between Marble Arch and Tottenham Court Road to smooth the way for the Oxford Street pedestrianisation (to proceed this month); although no alternative routes appear to have been provided for people on bicycles to replace this significant east-west cycling corridor.
With issues like climate and strategic resistance by nations resisting western threats and aggression, now topping a list of other all too often repeated reasons for promoting socially, economically and environmentally literate mobility, it might have been pertinent now to embrace and make the case for a default ‘Auto De Gast’ (car as guest) based roads hierarchy?
++ Meanwhile, as mainstream media stokes hire bike hysteria, with London boroughs seizing at least 3,000 ebikes this year (2,000 of which were Lime), TfL prepares to sort out the parking, and hopefully, charging and geo-fencing issues of the various hire bike operators, while also introducing the first batch of TfL-run buses.
Might this then lead the way to consolidating payment and running systems of public bikes and buses? Could an Oyster card hop-on hop-off service between bus, rail and bike alongside the overlooked reduction of through traffic that still consumes huge amounts of public space be the way forward?
++ As for the hire-bike ‘parking problem’, (as opposed to the unacknowledged feeling of living in a car-park: It’s True: The Typical Car Is Parked 95% of the Time), @BobFromAccounts on Twitter comments, “there are no Lime Bike parking problems in Paris and Berlin; it’s mainly a London issue caused by Luddite councils ignoring the huge demand for bikes and still prioritising car parking like it’s 1950. Bike sharing is growing 31% a year, I am happy the @MayorofLondon will step in“
++ Six years ago we learned from centreforlondon.org that the space taken up by parked vehicles in London was more than 14 km² (1,400 hectares)—about the area of 10 Hyde Parks. The estimate used the size of a standard parking space only – not the road area used by moving traffic.
++ Andrew Miller, P.Eng, querying the origins of the word ‘parking’ on LinkedIn, refers to Michele Richmond’s 2019 article, “The Etymology of Parking.”
More than 70,000 trees planted in strips that lined the roads of Washington D.C. happened to be prime sources of shade for horse-drawn carriages that tended to settle between the “parked” trees. When Washington DC was being planned back in the early 19th century, streets these lines of street trees were called “parking” and ironically so appealing as the car became popular in the 1920s and 30s, tens of thousands of car trips were made to see Washington’s beautiful parking, as motor vehicles replaced the space once used for tying horses.
Though saddened to see parking’s original meaning lost to the public storage of cars, Andrew says “it’s good to know what ideas led to where we are today. Personally I’d love to increase our parking supply if it meant we were using the old version of the term.”
“Let’s replace every other public parking spot with the [former] kind of parking and enjoy the greening of our cities and some refreshing shade in the summer.”
Sounds reasonable enough no? Some of us remember a time when the kerbside was used to park your bike.
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