MayorWatch

London News and Comment

The facts on cycle safety in London

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Jenny Jones is a member of the London Assembly
The Mayor of London was very careful at today’s City Hall Question Time to stick to his brief.

He said that the rate of cyclists killed and seriously injured on Transport for London roads has gone down since he was elected.

Those roads are 5% of the road network; that means the Mayor is ignoring the remaining 95% of roads, where over two thirds of the cyclists in London were killed or injured.

In my view, each and every one of these casualties is an individual tragedy and he really shouldn’t be ignoring any of them.

I am quite happy to say that the roads are safer for cyclists than they were in 2000 and it would be wrong to exaggerate the problem.

However, it would be equally wrong to mislead people about the fact that something has gone wrong in recent years. The roads were getting safer for cyclists and now they are not. That is a reality we have to address and radical changes are definitely needed.

A recent TfL fact sheet shows that more than two thirds of deaths and injuries occurred on borough roads (69%).

It is highly misleading of the Mayor’s supporters to make statements that roads are getting safer since he was elected, when the figures clearly show that this is not true when you look at the picture across the whole of London.

It also isn’t true that the TfL roads are getting safer if you look at the total casualties. These figures give you a much clearer idea of the day by day experience of cyclists, who are constantly facing near misses and close shaves.

Of course the Mayor could argue that he is not responsible for what happens on borough roads.

This would be a complete departure to from any Mayoral statements on road safety in the last twelve years, as the Mayor has pan London targets for casualty reduction and a pan London strategy for achieving them.

In fact, the Mayor through Transport for London gives the boroughs their funding for transport and the amount allocated for road safety has declined rapidly from £30m in 2008 to £10 in 2011.

The Mayor should not stand by and watch the boroughs’ road safety budget being cut by two thirds, nor should he read out figures which ignore over two thirds of the cyclists who are being killed and injured.

The Mayor needs to reverse his budget cuts, give people a realistic view of the danger on our roads and reverse the dangerous policy he adopted of giving priority to cars & lorries when designing junctions.

Jenny Jones is a Green Party member of the London Assembly

Comments

  1. A lot of cyclists Should be taken off the road.When i was at school you needed a CYCLING PROFICIENCY BADGE ON red triangle. Every lunatic thinks they can ride on road, pavement, go through red lights.

  2. I absolutely agree that a lot of cyclists should be taken off the road – where the road in question is a major transport route with high traffic speeds and/or volumes there should be decent separated cycle lanes to accomodate them.

    I remember the Cycling proficiency Badge – but I don’t remember many people getting one. A system which treats something “as easy as riding a bike” as needing some form of qualification or certificate is not working properly. Do I need a proficiency badge for walking?

  3. The vast majority of cyclist casualties in London are wholly or largely a driver’s fault. Either they didn’t see a cyclist, or, more rarely, they decided to ignore him/her. What is urgently needed is for drivers to take seriously their responsibilities towards other road users – drive slower, look more carefully, hang back if not clearly safe to pass. I believe this will only happen through better enforcement of existing law, plus a change to civil liability to make the operator of the heavier vehicle responsible for the costs of a collision, unless the other party can be proved to be negligent. This would apply to cyclists hitting pedestrians too.
    TfL and the mayor’s job is to change road infrastructure in places where drivers are encouraged to make bad judgements, and to create a street environment where it’s easy for road users to interact safely. The first step is to stop giving road capacity higher priority than road safety.

  4. When I get in my car, it has seat belts, crumple zones, air bags, anti-lock brakes, side-impact protection, computer designed tyres – a myriad of safety features. All of which point to one thing. Drivers are basically not very good at driving.
    If they were I wouldn’t need all of this stuff.

    When I ride my bike, I wear gloves (to stop me skinning my palms in case I fall off), and a helmet to help stop me from bumping my head.

    Drivers would suggest that I should also wear hi-viz clothing, have super bright lights and ride on cycle paths. Why? Because despite over 40 years of driver training, a myriad of new safety systems, car drivers are still rubbish?!

    Look at the problem properly, cyclists don’t tend to have serious accidents on their own!!!

  5. “It is highly misleading of the Mayor’s supporters to make statements that roads are getting safer since he was elected”

    like his claims that crime has fallen, that the tube has improved, that the city is cleaner?

    Take your pick.

  6. Robin,
    I got 99% in my cycling proficiency test – and I quite often (safely) go through red lights. Maybe cyclists ride on the pavement because the roads are so dangerous with the moronic ‘Chelsea tractor’ drivers who only have 1 hand on the wheel as they engage in a ‘vital’ phone call to their dimwit friends.

    Once again the cyclist is seen as the CAUSE and not the EFFECT of poor road policy in London.

    Let me ask you Robin, HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED IN LONDON by cyclists (running red lights or not) – and how many have died as a result of motor vehicles?

    It seems statistically your anger is misdirected and biased.

    Stop the motorists killing cyclists and you might find cyclists start behaving less aggresively.

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