Do you want a mayor who will bring about a revolution in London?

Hey everyone,

My name's Dan, I'm a volunteer for Wolmar for London, which is Christian Wolmar's campaign to become the Labour candidate for mayor of London 2016.

We’re a team of around 15 people who have worked tirelessly for three years on developing a proper grassroots movement outside of the Westminster bubble.

Christian is a former member of the board of Cycling England, and has cycled over 2,000 miles during the campaign in his efforts to be mayor.

We’ve developed a key set of transport policies, and the following are specifically for making cycling more appealing in London:

1. A network of safe, segregated, Dutch-style cycle lanes on major roads
   
2. A 20mph default on London’s roads that is properly enforced
   
3. A cycle bridge (E London) instead of a garden bridge
   
4. Cyclists at the heart of every road junction design
   
5. 50,000 new bicycle parking spaces
   
6. A cheaper and more extensive cycle hire scheme
   
7. 10% of all journeys in London by bike 2020
   
   

We now want to sign up 10,000 cyclists to have a say in the Labour’s mayoral selection this Summer.

You don’t need to be a member of the Labour party to vote.

If you sign up as a ‘supporter’ by August 12, then you too can have a vote for Labour’s next mayoral candidate. It costs £3, and your vote will bring us a little closer to a cycling revolution in London.

How to register to vote

1. Text Labour to 78555*
   or
   
2. Visit wolmarforlondon.co.uk/vote
   
   

Tell us when you’ve registered, and get others to sign up too.

All of our policies can be found at wolmarforlondon.co.uk - we also need volunteers to help plaster London with our spoke cards. We've already handed out 30,000.

Please feel free to ask any questions, and I’ll be happy to answer them!

1 Attachment

I'd love to see all of londons roads demolished an rebuilt with an optional, segregated lane for cyclists. Not going to happen though is it? The idea of slapping on a segregated lane to londons existing roads isn't really feasible and existing examples only really serve to increase conflict between cyclists, pedestrians and motorists.

The idea of slapping on a segregated lane to londons existing roads isn't really feasible

Why?

and existing examples only really serve to increase conflict between cyclists, pedestrians and motorists.

Because they're often done in a completely half-arsed manner.

Why?

No room? You'll have to knock buildings.

Forget segregated lanes, spend money on improving the road surface, also we've got plenty of bridges to cross, leave the garden bridge alone ;)

I like the focus on better provisions for bike locking though.

No room? You'll have to knock buildings.

I think people get into the habit of thinking about London and seeing just narrow roads like the ones off Seven Dials or their own residential roads. London, as everyone knows, is a big place and there's a lot of big, arterial roads where there is plenty of space for segregated lanes. There's no need to scratch putting in lanes on these just because other roads are narrow. The upshot is that you'll probably get a lot of unlinked cycle routes but at least then you'll have something to link up. Also the changes that the sections bring about could make it easier to design those links, they certainly won't make them worse.

https://aseasyasridingabike.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/there-is-not-the-width-available/

Why the bike-centricity? That poster looks so sad..

A cycle bridge? Surely a walking and cycling, skateboarding, rollerblading bridge.

And I think people should be at the heart of every junction redesign, thinking about who and how many use each one and how.
Is there room for walkers to share that "at the heart" position?

leave the garden bridge alone ;)

Garden bridge can get stuffed.
Grow some clematis and jasmine on the hungerford footbridge, if you want some pretty plants. Plans for faux-public private finance controlled spaces very much should not be left alone...

Paris have just closed off another bit by the Seine:

Do that.

Now spread to three sites along the river, the Paris Plages scheme hasn’t just shown how delightful the riverside can be, it has proved that the city could divert motor traffic without kick-starting Armageddon. Taking note, the city barred cars permanently from a long stretch of the Left Bank in 2013 to create a waterside park. The results of this plan are already impressive: 4 million visitors in its first 18 months and a 15 percent reduction in local nitrous oxide pollution.

http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/05/in-paris-plans-for-a-river-seine-reinvention/392639/

The garden bridge is stupid, Lumley can cock off, it works out at £600k per tree.

Yeah that's true, if possible the link ups could be formed by scrapping these narrow central one ways and turing them into cycle only lanes, providing that delivery/emergency access is still possible of course.

Why the bike-centricity? That poster looks so sad..

Cos this is a biek forum.

I expect they have done ones about pedestrians and skateboarders but have put those on pedestrian and skateboarding forums. Maybe even ones for gays on gay forums and goths on goth forums.

It's very, very clever marketing innit?

Personally, I'm going to keep my £3 and use it much more wisely by changing it into tuppences in the local arcade and throwing them at daft Labour politicians who think a contrived, poorly written poster will convince us to vote for them.

While not a big fan of the blog, aseasyasridingabike does show some perfectly good examples of redistributed road space in favour of non-motorised traffic that would still allow as much emergency vehicle access as they did before.

As for deliveries? We seem to have become a nation obsessed that Ocado be able to park their truck right outside our front door in order to be able make a delivery of food to our home because going to the shops for what we want is the worst experience in the world ever. We might have to accept that this may not be the most accurate reflection of the truth. I could ramble endlessly about my experiences as a driver's mate/delivery assistant if you want. However, in short, it really isn't that hard to make that final stretch of delivery to a customer without the aid of a motor. In those actually rare instances where it isn't a feasible exercise, application of exception over rule is the case. Refusing to eliminate common vehicular traffic on the basis of "oh someone might want an awkward delivery one day" is the kind of shitty decision making that got us into this godawful situation in the first place. As a cyclist, if I occasionally had to cope with an obstruction on an otherwise traffic free route then I hope I would be reasonable minded enough not to be an utter asshat about it. Perhaps you might be inclined to do the same. If not, fuck it, I hope those responsible for deciding this stuff are thick skinned enough not to lose sleep over the infrequent inconveniences of a bunch of bed-wetting whingers.

No room for bike lanes. Lol.

In an overcrowded city efficiency of movement no people is key. Getting people to cycle requires segregation on busy arterial routes.

Cos this is a biek forum.
... convince us to vote for them.

Yeah I know... (that's what's so sad about it.)

A cycle bridge? Surely a walking and cycling, skateboarding, rollerblading bridge.

You realise a cycling/ped bridge is current tfl policy? Plans are very advanced for a connection between Westminster and lambeth... You amazed by the concept.

As a cyclist, if I occasionally had to cope with an obstruction on an otherwise traffic free route then I hope I would be reasonable minded enough not to be an utter asshat about it. Perhaps you might be inclined to do the same.

Ok.... just to clarify here I was being quite literal about having cycle only streets linking the major routes, I think you've taken me the wrong way. The reason I mention delivery access (for business) is because of the industry I work in.

We use a plethora of security/bullet proof vans or whatever you want to call them to go between our offices, these absolutely have to have direct internal access to our complexes so we have to have a road network. They need to drive straight into the building have the blast doors close behind them. These guys cant be unloading a few streets up, they wouldn't last five minutes, I'm just covering all the bases here.

What I'm saying is if you were to close some slow pointless one way roads to cars then you could great thriving streets with small retail and independent businesses setting up that don't have humongous deliveries every day, plenty of bike parking as well, not having to be put off about going to these places because you can't park the car, it could work.

P.S Just for the record the business I work for is located on a narrow one way route, we are the second only firm on quite a big one way system that needs on sight delivery. The six floors above us for example are all trading or HQ offices for big business and that's just one corner.

This whole and quite vast one way system would be brilliant for a cycle only scheme. Most of the time this road is only used as a rat run for taxis.

I worked with Christian in my old job for years, I know a lot of people who have worked with him too from the transport industry. He is a good egg but he's not going to start a revolution. Perhaps our definition of revolution is different though.

London is fucked end of...thanks to Blair and Cameron's open door policies.

Welcome to London!

Surely the revolution would be changing the law to be more Dutch. Ergo, unless provable otherwise, the accident was the drivers fault. Might reduce the need for segregated lanes, be far cheaper, and may focus driving habits. But perhaps not

Don't actually think we need a new bridge... Just the wording.
Even to the east, the 2 tunnels and ferry do a good job and still allow for big boats. You can even take your bike on the DLR these days, which crosses the river at 2 points.

I mean, don't get me wrong i think a car-free bridge (somewhere it's actually useful, ie. not central London) would be awesome, just not a priority.

I suspect that a car free bridge is one of those potentially costly big-bang infrastructure projects that we just love to greenlight when several hundred cheaper, smarter infrastructure projects could have had a far greater effect.

See also HS2. I expect Wolmar knows all about that, having written extensively on choo choos in the past.

London is fucked end of...thanks to Blair and Cameron's open door policies.

Is this comment as EDL-ish as it looks?