Cycle campaigning

I really don't like the LCC tagline 'clear space for cycling'. It doesn’t mean anything in the London context. If anything they should be, campaigning for making sharing space easier through reducing speeds, educating drivers and cyclists, creating places where it is pleasant to walk around, where people can cross roads, sit on a bench and watch the world go by.

There is a need to enforce risky behavior by drivers and make it harder, less accepable and much more expensive to drive so that fewer people drive and those that do are going slower and looking out more for other people.

I think the logic behind the 'space' line is that several of these collisions have happened in places where there isn't even a mandatory lane - Aldgate is just blue paint with no line to indicate drivers shouldn't enter it, and High Holborn has nothing. Given the volumes of bike traffic at these locations they need much better provision, but there's seemingly no acknowledgement of bikes there.

The debate over the merits of segregation vs shared space is a lengthy one, but the message for TfL/Boris is that the current default of doing virtually nothing for bikes isn't good enough.