Boris ‘the bike’ guilty of massive underspend

Mayor of London Boris Johnson has been accused of presiding over “a massive underspend” on cycling in London. Green Party Assembly Member Darren Johnson, who raised similar concerns last year, claims that since 2008, there has been a £150 million shortfall between the £588 million allocated to cycling and actual expenditure.

At Mayor’s Question Time yesterday, Darren Johnson quizzed the man whose surname he shares about discrepancies between those figures, obtained from a number of sources including Transport for London (TfL) and the mayor’s own responses to previous questions put to him at City Hall.

During the current financial year, he says there will be a £38 million underspend, equivalent to just over a third of the £111 million budgeted. He has also drawn up figures for previous years:

TfL claimed underspending on cycling in London

Year	Total claimed	Actual spent	Carried over
2008/09	£55m	£44.8m	£10m
2009/10	£111m	£57m	£54m
2010/11	£116m + boroughs	£100m + boroughs	£16m
2011/12	£94m	£82m	£12m
2012/13	£101m	£81m?	£20m
2013/14	£111m	£73m	£38m

According to Darren Johnson, “The information is sourced from a variety of MQT answers and correspondence with TfL. The 2012/13 figure is an estimate based upon TfL Board papers as the figures have not been forthcoming, despite repeated requests since last March.”

Yesterday, he told the mayor: “I understand once more that TfL are forecasting a large underspend on cycling and I think again and again each year we have this problem where yourself and Andrew Gilligan [London’s cycling champion, appointed by the mayor in 2013] announce some impressive figures for the cycling budget and then the reality is there’s a massive underspend on that.

“At a time when we absolutely need investment to make our roads safer, all the public concern about those being killed and seriously injured, yet the published cycling budget bears very little resemblance to the money that’s actually spent over the course of the year.”

After outlining the figures for several of the years in question, he said: “You’re announcing these very impressive figures and then not following it through with the investment that’s actually needed.”

“That’s not right,” countered the mayor. “Obviously there’s movement between years and the money committed will be spent on cycling. We are pushing out a huge amount of money on cycling and improving safety in cycling.

“You’re right to mention that’s a big cause for public concern, perhaps I could remind you that the number of cycling deaths has fallen even though the number of cycling journeys has massively risen.”

Opposition politicians, including the Green Party’s Baroness Jones and Liberal Democrat Caroline Pidgeon, who chairs the GLA’s transport committee, have criticised the mayor over his record on cycling, with the former saying that despite his insistence that cycling is getting safer in London, saying that the evidence is that the opposite is the case.

The mayor told Darren Johnson “I share your impatience. I’m not minimising this point. I share your impatience. I know Andrew Gilligan and [TfL commissioner] Peter Hendy do as well, they want to get on with it as fast as anybody. You cannot just water-cannon money at projects and hope that they go right.”

In a press release issued following their exchange, Darren Johnson said: “I am angry about the fact that people have been killed and seriously injured while money that should have been used to make roads safer has been left unspent.

“This £150m under-spend is more than the Transport for London budget for safer junctions over the next decade.

“Transport for London has had the time and the money to have made around 50 junctions safer during the last six years.

“That is a lot of pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries which could have been avoided if Transport for London had got on with it.”

“The Mayor needs to get a grip on TfL and ensure that they start creating the safer places to cycle that they are being given the money to do.

“Boris Johnson has some good plans for cycling, but unless the delivery improves he will be remembered as the Mayor who brought death and injury to London’s roads.”

It’s not the first time that the Green politician has taken the mayor to task over funding for cycling in the capital.

In a blog post published on road.cc in April last year, he said that he believed published figures for annual budgets for cycling spend included amounts carried over from previous years – money allocated but never spent.

He also raised concerns that the mayor’s much-publicised announcement that he had nearly £1 billion to cycling over the remainder of the decade to help realise his ‘2020 Vision’ deliberately underestimated the full amount that would be needed to realise that, in “the expectation that much of it won’t happen.”

5000 cyclists surround parliament

road.cc

On the eve of yesterday’s Parliamentary debate of the Get Britain Cycling report, the Labour Party threw its weight strongly behind improving conditions for cycling with the launch of Labour for Cycling, a campaign from the party’s SERA environmental group.

As the debate started, a claimed 5,000 people rode from Jubilee Gardens to Parliament square an for the first time in its history Palace of Westminster was entirely surrounded by protestors on bikes.

Image: London Cycling Campaign

In supporting cycling, Labour is unsurprisingly taking the chance to have a pop at what it claims is the coalition government’s gap between words and deeds.

“Cycling is currently seeing high visibility, with politicians on all sides eager to be seen with a cycle helmet or a Brompton,” writes Lambeth councillor and environmental campaigner Martin Tiedemann on the SERA website. “But for David Cameron, cycling means a photo opportunity with the ministerial car lurking around the corner, while Boris Johnson has been content to take the credit for a cycling revolution in London’s City Hall brought in by Ken Livingstone. We know that it is Labour councils, like Hackney, Camden and Lambeth in London, Manchester and Oxford elsewhere, who are showing the real leadership on cycling.

“In recent weeks, we’ve welcomed the announcement of money for cycling in a number of cities around England but, as Tom Hayes pointed out on our website, this was largely double counting and replacing the money cut when the Tories abolished Cycling England, set up by Labour. Not so much cycle as spin cycle.”

Strong stuff, but if Labour matches rhetoric with policies and action, it could make them the most pro-cycling of the big three parties at the next election.

Image: London Cycling Campaign

Transport charity Sustrans commented that the passionate pro-cycling words from MPs must now be backed by action.

Sustrans policy director, Jason Torrance, said: “Cycling bridged the political divide tonight, with MPs from all parties supporting renewed action from government as they spoke passionately about the need to get more Britons on their bikes.

“But words without action will do little to make our roads safer, improve the health of our population or give the economy its much-needed boost.

“We need to remove barriers to cycling that government is introducing such as the parking free-for-all in our town centres, while also setting ambitious targets for UK cycling levels and introducing legislative change in England that echoes the Active Travel (Wales) Bill.”

Sustrans is calling on the government to immediately:

Dedicate an annual budget to cycling
Set targets for increasing levels of cycling
Appoint a cycling champion
Implement blanket 20mph speed limits in residential areas

The London Cycling Campaign (LCC) organised the ‘Space for Cycling’ ride that accompanied the debate and claimed 5000 people had taken part, forming a procession several miles long.

While Sustrans and Labour for Cycling have national objectives, London Cycling Campaign is focussed on the capital. Its puerpose in yesterday’s protest ride was to remind Mayor of London Boris Johnson “that providing dedicated space for cycling is vitally important for make our streets safe and inviting for everyone.”

The measures London Cycling Campaign wants to see include: making main roads and major junctions safe for cycling using segregated tracks and cyclist-specific traffic lights to protect people from fast-moving and heavy motor traffic; and transforming local streets – where people predominantly live and shop – into spaces that are safe for cycling and walking by removing through motor traffic and reducing its speed.

Riding above the traffic in London – the future sky effect

 

Last month ride.cc how Boris Johnson had revealed very rudimentary plans for an elevated cycle path over London, and now a firm of architects has produced sketches of how the project, with the working name SkyCycle, might look.

Sam Martin, a landscape architect and director of Exterior Architecture, has apparently been in discussions with the Mayor of London and Network Rail since May about using disused railway lines above ground in a network linking mainline railway stations across the capital.

Here it is:

Mr Martin “TfL estimate the number of journeys made by bike will treble to around 1.5 million by 2020. Where are they meant to go? SkyCycle is the next logical step, because you can’t realistically build more cycle lanes on ground level.

“You have to start knocking down buildings and there will always be the problem of traffic. It will be less safe than it is now and you can’t persuade people to get on bikes as it is even if you keep raising taxes on cars.

“Boris loves the idea and Network Rail are really positive about it. I sincerely believe it could be the next significant piece of London infrastructure and would transform the capital.

“It has been compared to New York’s High Line, which I am familiar with, but the reality is this is a completely different concept.”

Mr Martin’s plans include a pay-as-you-ride Oyster service, which he proposes costing £1 per journey, with a corporate sponsor like Barclays helping to fund the construction costs.

It is thought the first route could be built on the Olympic regeneration of east London, linking Stratford with the City of London through Liverpool and Fenchurch Street stations but this has yet to be confirmed.

 

London not the cycle friendly city it tries so hard to portray

Excellent article in the guardian:

London is a city full of bicycles, but many of them don’t get out much. The thing that’s stopping them most is fear: the fear on their owners’ part of injury and death. As a Londoner whose bicycle rarely sees the great urban outdoors, I have no trouble believing a Transport for London analysis of cycling potential, published this time last year, which found that concern for personal safety “was the most significant barrier to cycling in general”.

The dreadful news that a 16th cyclist has died on London’s roads in 2011 – dubbed by the city’s mayor Boris Johnson the “year of cycling” – provides no reassurance. Two of those 16 perished in the autumn after colliding with lorries on one of Johnson’s four “cycle superhighways” that goes through a busy roundabout in Bow, just a stone’s throw from the 2012 Olympic Park. The mayor claims to be leading a “cycling revolution” in the capital. How is that “revolution” going, and at what cost?
The story told by the Tory mayor and those who implement his policies is that “cycling is on the up“, although what kind of “up”, and why, is in dispute. A recent written answer said that “cycle flows” on the capital’s main routes grew by 15% between 2009/10 and 2010/11, but does that mean that many more Londoners have started cycling? That TfL analysis of cycling potential found that between 2001 and 2008 there was a high degree of churn, with people trying out pedal power then thinking better of it. An increase in cycle travel was down to people making more cycle trips rather than more people taking up cycling.
The mayor claims that his commuter-route superhighways and loss-making cycle hire scheme – which benefits only central London so far – are popular triumphs. Yet these high-profile, Barclays bank-sponsored initiatives have been developed while funding has been slashed for a London-wide cycle route network that critics say would have done far more to foster cycling across the metropolis as a whole. Team Johnson and TfL are now insisting that safety is a priority, and are reviewing the design of all superhighway junctions, while rejecting accusations that these routes are little more than a few lanes of blue paint.
But the mayor is coming under sustained attack over an area of transport policy – where London mayors have their greatest powers – that overlaps inconveniently with his public image as a lovably eccentric “cycling mayor”. Brian Paddick, his Liberal Democrat challenger for next year’s mayoral election, has claimed that Johnson’s roads policy “puts peoples’ lives at risk” due to his prioritising “smoothing traffic flow” for private cars and commercial vehicles.
The Green party’s candidate, Jenny Jones, who is also a member of the London Assembly, is unimpressed by the way Johnson has distanced himself from the failure of TfL, whose board the mayor chairs, to implement recommendations by London cycling campaigners and its own consultants that would have seen the Bow superhighway designed differently. According to the “cycling mayor”, this was all news to him.
Johnson’s fellow City Hall Conservatives had a tricky time last week after a walk-out by the assembly’s Tory group meant that a cycling safety motion couldn’t be debated. Such sabotages have become routine, whatever the subject – they stem from a long-running complaint about scrutiny committees – and the Tory AMs do have cyclists in their ranks, including one who has backed the campaign against Johnson’s proposed junction redesign at Blackfriars bridge. But they might not have anticipated the father of the most recent fatal victim telling BBC London News that politicians should be “thoroughly ashamed of themselves“.
Nobody disputes that there is more cycling in London than there was 10 years ago, but the mayor’s progress towards creating the “cyclised city” he says he craves is coming under the spotlight not only from rival politicians – he’ll come under more pressure about safety at his monthly question time on Wednesday – but also articulate and energetic campaign groups mobilising on the blogosphere. Even the planning inspectorate’s response to the draft of Johnson’s new London Plan, the master document signposting the capital’s future development, thought his target for increasing cycling’s transport “modal share” unambitious.
It said he ought to find a place for a hierarchy of road-users, with more sustainable forms such as cycling at the top. There’s not much chance of that. Johnson’s encouragement of cycling falls short of causing too much nuisance to his first priority – the motorist, especially the suburban variety whose electorally loyalty he needs. He is, after all, a Conservative.

Boris the bike champ (again to the rescue)

ROAD.CC

Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who two years ago gave chase on his bike to a gang of girls attempting to mug a woman in Camden, has played Good Samaritan again after stopping to help a fellow cyclist who had been knocked off his bike and injured when a minicab driver opened his car door into his path.

The incident took place on Monday evening in Southwark Street as Mr Johnson returned – on a Boris Bike, naturally – to City Hall following a meeting in the West End, reports the London Evening Standard.

Mr Johnson telephoned for an ambulance and remained with the victim until emergency services arrived at the scene, adds the newspaper, which also provided an eyewitness account from project manager Liam Smith, who was passing by.

“I saw Boris speed past me on his Boris bike and go through two red lights,” said Mr Smith, with perhaps a little more detail than the Mayor would appreciate.

“A short while later I saw him at the junction of Southwark Bridge Road with a small crowd of people and an injured cyclist.

“The man was bleeding from his mouth and had cuts on his hands and knees,” Mr Smith added. “He was very pale and barely conscious.

“Boris was on the phone calling an ambulance and then he was saying to the man, ‘stay awake, stay awake, what is your name?’

“He was shaking him gently to stop him from passing out. A guy brought him a glass of water and was saying, ‘don’t worry, you are being looked after by the Mayor of London’. The cyclist said his name was Richard and he was on his way to visit a friend.”

Mr Smith added that an off-duty member of St John’s Ambulance helped administer first aid to the stricken cyclist, while the mini cab driver also remained at the scene.

While Mr Johnson is without doubt one of the capital’s most high-profile cyclists, and certainly the one best placed to influence policy when it comes to getting around the city on two wheels, some of his decisions have been criticised as being at odds with his much-vaunted desire to bring about a “cycling revolution” in London.

There has been a series of protests by cycle campaigners against his and Transport for London’s decision to scrap a temporary 20 mile an hour speed limit on Blackfriars Bridge, while two years ago he was criticised for effectively scrapping the Commercial Vehicle Education unit after axing funding for the body, which was staffed and operated by the Metropolitan Police.

Boris Brompton Bike

Keeping on the Friday Brompton theme … I see Boris made a trip to the factory that a lot of commuters are glad exist …. the only thing that could make Brompton better is a belt driven version but that is a post for another time …..

 

LONDON, UK – To promote the UK capital’s business successes outside the Square Mile, and to see the role businesses like Brompton play in supporting London’s economy, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, visited the Brompton Bicycle factory in West London.

 

Boris Johnson is known in the UK and abroad as the bicycling Mayor after the introduction of the Barclays-liveried “Boris’s bikes” rental system last year.

 

After paying Fuller’s Brewery a visit in Chiswick, the Mayor rode on a Brompton bicycle with Brompton’s Managing Director, Will Butler-Adams, for the short ride to the factory in Brentford. Here he met several members of Brompton’s staff and the manufacturing facility.

 

Boris said of the visit: “Here Brompton are building their bikes by the Great West Road; it’s just a great example of the diversity of manufacturing found here in London.”

 

Will said: “It is fantastic to have the Mayor of London visit the factory and see what we are doing first hand. We take great pride in making a quality product here in the capital, and getting Boris in the saddle was a great way to demonstrate the product. We had a lot of fun on the ride from Chiswick; I think he really liked the bike!”