Paul, this all comes from the fundamentally wrong position that there are millions of people just waiting for a cycle superhighway to be built and then they'll just be champing at the bit to cycle everywhere. It's out of the same nonsense mould of LCC's claim of a £5bn per annum cycling industry just waiting to happen & TfL's fantasy cycling increase figures.It's plainly nonsense. You know it, I know it, Government know it, but still they plough ahead to be seen to be doing something, regardless of how ineffective it actually is, because it is cheap.So, RBKC resist the imposition of a cycle lane on a busy road that isn't really suitable for it & no-one in the cycle world has the wit to re-route a cycle lane? Isn't that a failure of imagination there? Or is it only that cycle lanes can only go on main roads, which in itself is counter-intuitive to transport strategies of forcing all traffic onto A roads?There needs to be a move away from the fallacy that causing greater delays on arterial roads is going to get people to cycle. It's not. Unless you like wasting time, you don't drive down Kensington High Street unless you need to, reducing the capacity isn't going to affect that need.You're really comparing apples with piano's when comparing The City with any other part of London & you know it. The City is unique in that is has virtually no population, for example, it has barely 6% of RBKC's population. The lack of population makes for a very different political and policy environment.You're ignoring the point, that for journey's that pass through Central London, there aren't that many substitutable journey's. If they were substitutable, no-one would suffer the pain of driving through Central London. It's shit. On a huge scale. It's a route you only take if you really need to.The same exemptions applied to London would make such a scheme pointless. As you know, allowing taxi's through (& there's little prospect of it only being Black Cabs, not without a long and expensive legal challenge that TfL can ill afford) means that you're not removing many vehicles from the road. The explosion in private hire numbers and delivery vehicles is what has driven the increase in miles driven. To pretend otherwise is dishonest.Oxford has been nightmarish for a driver since at least 2002, which is the first time I visited it, so I'm not surprised that the City Council is struggling to make it harder.I know how the Government funding worked, and there was absolutely no requirement to put in bad designs, or in fact, to put in any cycle lanes at all.The waste of money from badly thought out designs, that were immediately obviously wrong, is unforgiveable.Some people, and potentially more fool them, believed it when the Government brought in time-limited arrangements to "fight Covid" instead of recognising the outright dishonesty that was attached to those schemes.A tiny fraction of London's population are benefiting from this work & it will remain a tiny fraction, no matter what the pipe-dreams of the cycle enthusiasts are.
Mark Warburton ● 1678d