What skill level do I need to ride a bike? Or for my daughter to be safe on the road?

Oliver, yes, I'm familiar with how Hackney has gone about things (used to live there some years ago) & I admire what's been achieved already. Here's hoping for a bright future - I think with modal filtering it tends to be more popular after it's built than before? As in, even though people may oppose it in the first place, once it's gone in few ever campaign to have it removed -- I'd be really interested if you have some before/after numbers for any of the Hackney schemes.

Interesting point re road building - typically with rat runs, they don't actually take that much volume, perhaps 10-20% of what's on the "A" roads in many cases, so I don't think there's necessarily much of a capacity issue.. however, it does mean that some of the time drivers will have to spend more time on those A-roads, and that in turn may create pressure to widen them.

On the other hand - at least where I'm campaigning (Croydon), there are so very many car journeys which could be transferred to cycling or other non car modes - TfL's own rather conservative stats suggest 30%+ - that any congestion produced as a result of improved cycling facilities is probably self-limiting. Whether that's true in parts of central London where there seem to be more vans and taxis than cars, I wouldn't like to say.

The numbers I mentioned come from needing a handful of bollards per square mile over a couple of hundred square miles. The actual hardware is cheap, but the design work and legal process not so much.. this all, of course, rather depends on how much of that the authorities deem necessary. It's all too easy for a cynical, incompetent or unwilling LA to blow £20k consulting on a scheme whose actual build cost is a tenth as much, or gold-plate it with expensive and fancy public realm upgrades when a few metres of girder would be just as effective from a cycling point of view.

Not sure where you;'re based but after last years tragedy where 6 people lost their lives cycling, the police were cynically out in force (having said for the previous 6 months there was no money for policing). The roads were a lot calmer.

Yes - was certainly noticeable in central London, but didn't have to go far out for the old bad habits to continue as normal. In Peckham you'd not notice anything had changed.