Blood on the streets

from Idiot's posting of this article

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/22/london-cyclists-road-safety-boris-johnson

"Johnson may be the "cycling mayor" who's introduced a hire scheme, but the policies of his predecessor Ken Livingstone (who would have introduced one too) helped cyclists and pedestrians in ways Johnson has eschewed. Transport professor David Beggs has described Livingstone as a trailblazer who "believed in a roads hierarchy which prioritised pedestrians, cyclists and buses in that order", and "presided over a modal shift from car to public transport, walking and cycling which was unrivalled worldwide". Road-pricing – the congestion charge – was central to Livingstone's approach, as were "public realm" reforms such as the remodelling of Trafalgar Square.

Under Livingstone the car went down the pecking order, to the benefit of everyone else. Johnson, by contrast, has halved the congestion charge zone, dumped or declined to embrace pedestrianisation, produced no significant plans for expanding the bus service, dismantled the modal hierarchy and made a priority of "smoothing traffic flow" – code for helping cars get around the place faster. Rallying his troops before last year's mayoral election campaign he called his opponents "car-hating". For "good old Boris" motorist umbrage has been a source of votes. His recent "cycling vision" has excited some campaigners, not least for pledging to "go Dutch" with some segregated lanes. But it remains to be seen how much of the vision will live up to the PR."

I always wondered how much Boris Johnson actually had to do with the hire scheme and the superhighways and how much more could have been done with Ken Livingstone sat in the mayoral throne. And it still irks, that it feels like the majority of people who voted for Boris, were really voting against Livingstone, and whether you liked him or not, it felt like there was at least some thought and coherence behind Ken's policies. And the first paragraph above seems to make that evident.

Common mate! How many times have you been present when I've made exactly this point about BJ repealing many of Ken's plans to make things better?!