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Broken bike (CC licensed image by garryknight, www.flickr.com)Protests planned for Bank Junction amid calls for London HGV ban
Bank Junction in the City of London, where a 26-year-old cyclist lost her life in a collision with a tipper lorry yesterday morning, will be brought to a standstill twice in the coming week as campaigners call for the capital’s streets to be made safer for people on bikes.
David Lammy, who hopes to secure the Labour Party’s nomination for next year’s Mayoral election, has called for lorries to be banned from the city at peak hours to protect cyclists.
Meanwhile rival prospective candidate for Labour, the transport expert Christian Wolmar, has said he will attend tomorrow’s protest which is being staged by the London Cycling Campaign (LCC).
A bike officer from City of London Police has described the junction as “probably the most dangerous in London” for cyclists, but Mayor Boris Johnson is resisting calls for lorries to be removed from the streets at rush hour.
26-year-old Ying Tao, a recently married Cambridge graduate who also studied for a master’s degree at Oxford and was riding to her work as a management consultant at PwC, was the eighth cyclist to be killed in London so far this year.
Six of the cyclists killed so far this year in London were women, and lorries have been involved in seven out of the eight fatal incidents.
LCC protest at Bank tomorrow …
The LCC protest tomorrow morning will see cyclists meet at two locations – the south side of Finsbury Circus, and the north end of London Bridge – at 8am, the groups setting of a quarter of an hour later and converging on Bank Junction at 8.30am where they will remain for 15 minutes.
The campaign group said: “More must be done to create high quality space for cycling across London, to enable people of all ages and abilities to ride safely in our city. This includes making lorries safer.”
.. followed by Stop Killing Cyclists vigil on Monday
Stop Killing Cyclists will be holding a vigil and die-in at the same junction next Monday evening, and like the LCC protest it will commemorate not only Mrs Tao, but also Clifton James, aged 60, who died in Harrow at around 1am on Sunday morning after he was struck by a car. The motorist involved was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving.
In a statement, the group described Bank as “a horrendous junction – 7 major and 2 minor roads merge there, meaning no matter how good the driving or cycling it’s a nightmare – with absolutely no sensible provision for cyclists and even pedestrians poorly looked after.
“At least three of these roads needs to be closed to through traffic and made over for the huge numbers of pedestrians and cyclists using this junction at rush hour every day. A staggering 33% of the rush hour traffic is already cyclists at this junction.”
According to the London Evening Standard, six City of London bike officers were stationed at Bank Junction this morning to provide “public reassurance.”
“The worst junction in London”
One told the newspaper: “This is clearly a very dangerous junction probably the worst in London in my opinion.
“People are obviously very upset by what happened and we are here to monitor the junction and talk to whoever wants to talk to us.”
With transport and policing the two chief areas of responsibility for London’s mayor and people increasingly taking to two wheels to travel through the city, with an election due in less than a year’s time the issue of cycle safety is once again set to figure strongly in the campaign.
David Lammy calls for rush hour lorry ban …
Tottenham MP Lammy, who recently said that he is too scared to ride a bike in London at times when traffic is heaviest, told the Standard: “My view is that only by banning HGVs from London during rush hour will we give cyclists the protection they need.
“We’ve got to take bold decisions. Why can’t deliveries be made well into the night? There are some working practices London has got to change. Too often everything seems to stop at about 4.30pm.”
… but Christian Wolmar wants “more intelligent” approach …
Wolmar, who is also looking to be Labour’s candidate for mayor in the election next May, explained in a post on his website why he will be taking part in tomorrow’s protest.
He said: “Enough is enough. It is time to get angry. The death of a young woman hit by a tipper truck at Bank yesterday highlights the lack of concerted action from both Transport for London and the City Corporation on bike safety.
“The huge increase in cycling in central London is no longer a new phenomenon as there has been rapid growth for years,” he continued.
“While there are lots of plans for improvement, there is no sense of urgency about them. Bank, for example, is due for improvement some time in 2020.”
According to Wolmar, places such as New York City show that at places where danger is apparent, “instead of waiting for the perfect scheme that will cost millions, remedial action can take place quickly with the use of plastic and paint,” and that “permanent changes can then be introduced at a later stage.”
But he said that barriers exist to bar lorries from entering London at peak times, explaining: “Calling for a total ban is cheap politics but in reality difficult to bring about, as there is a night time ban in London that prevents trucks coming earlier.
“Therefore nothing would be able to enter the central area until after 9.30, something that the freight lobby would protest loudly about.
“Instead we need a more intelligent approach – a systematic assessment of what lorries need to come in, and the introduction of a licensing system in order to ensure that only those with a real need can enter the central area at rush hour.
“In tandem, we need to rush through the creation of a Dutch style segregated network of cycle lanes on TfL’s strategic road network. The main routes used by trucks could be prioritised to ensure they were made safe first.”
Last week, we reported how the developers of 22 Bishopsgate, which if it secures planning permission is scheduled for completion in 2019, aim to introduce a planned delivery schedule both during and after the construction phase that would see lorries arrive at the site outside peak hours, and deliveries consolidated outside central London.
Wolmar said: “Much, too, can be done about deliveries reducing the number through consolidation centres. All this, though, needs urgency and strong direction, something that has been lacking from Mayor Johnson.”
… and Boris Johnson says ban would shift the danger elsewhere
Yesterday, in the wake of the crash that claimed Mrs Tao’s life, the mayor reiterated his opposition to removing HGVs from London’s streets at peak times.
He said: “We've thought about this a lot over the years. The difficulty with a rush hour ban is you would basically push the lorry activity to the surrounding hours and I'm afraid that is certainly when the fatalities would then occur. We think you would simply disperse the incidents.”
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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35 comments
As others have said, the idea that...
_
"The difficulty with a rush hour ban is you would basically push the lorry activity to the surrounding hours and I'm afraid that is certainly when the fatalities would then occur. We think you would simply disperse the incidents"
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... is nonsense. There are far fewer cyclists in central London outside the peak commuting times.
very busy protest this morning, great turn out!
I know the junction in question very well, the exit where the terrible incident happened this week could easily catch out an inexperienced cyclist.
Trucks can turn immediately left or can go straight on (which is actually a slight left). When a truck is going straight on (slight left), they must move over to the left to avoid a traffic island.
A cyclist following the truck here thinks they are safe and the truck is going straight on, however the truck must move over to get between the islands.
If a cyclist follows a truck through there too closely, they risk being killed and risk being under a truck which has moved over unexpectedly. The cyclist would have no view of the traffic island which is causing the trucks to move left.
This is a terrible road junction as it puts cyclist in a position where they can be caught out by a truck moving over unexpectedly. It's terrible for lorry drivers as they get caught out by the road narrowing in between two islands and must quickly decide if its safe to slightly move over, we can't possibly know if there was visibility from the cab.
A re designing of this junction would be the top priority, taking out that traffic island should be done straight away.
segregated cycle lane ideally!! Not sure whether educating cyclists or lorry drivers would reduce the risk entirely, nor would imposing a 20mph limit, something drastic needs to be done.
This one? Hard to see what on earth it is for. It is right next to where the truck was stopped.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.513493,-0.088963,3a,75y,153.73h,70.01t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sVJ4ImAcGQwKcQH3Q9eArCw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en
The reason why construction lorries have to travel during the day is because that's when the construction is being done.
City construction sites are extremely restricted spaces. There is no room for stockpiling spoil or incoming materials. It has to be delivered and removed immediately.
If you want the lorries to operate in the evening then the construction will have to be in the evening. That will really annoy the residents! And of course it is entirely impractical and dangerous to attempt such work in the dark.
The proper question to ask is why City buildings have a lifespan of about 30 years. (Hint - the property speculation involved probably makes more money than the actual businesses housed in the buildings.)
Paris doesn't have the construction lorry problem because it doesn't have the constant construction churn.
It "has to" on current budgets. Forcing this to change will cost the construction companies money - but they've got intelligent people working for them who can work out ways to do it.
If that's the price of saving lives and making roads safer then it needs to happen.
I commute by bike in London, but not at rush hour. A ban on rush hour movement of HGVs is likely to make my ride very slightly more dangerous. HOWEVER, it will make the rides of thousands of other people MUCH safer and should be implemented asap.
It's a quick-fix and may cause some other minor issues, but it works elsewhere in the world and worked during the Olympics here. Maybe this is why it's unlikely to happen - too much evidence of success. Maybe we should try asking people to be nice again, and blaming victims some more like usual.
Well allow them in at night! The ban on night time access for HGV's is perverse. The City turns into a ghost town at night, it's all but empty, this is the best and safest time to allow access.
As far as I understand it, the premise for the night time ban is that it disturbs the peace of the residents. In the City? What residents?
There are over 7,000 residents in the City of London alone and this number has been growing quickly in recent years.
There's 8.5M people in London.
Basing policy on the needs of 0.01% of the population is a little barking
And the population of Greater London is expected to grow to 10 million in the next 10 years or so. That will require more construction and more tipper trucks.
Fixed that for you
Yep, your amendment is fine with me. Have a look at the posts I made in the other story with a discussion on truck safety. There are ways to improve the safety of tipper trucks and a few firms have made a conscious effort in that regard. Why the measures that they have made are not now compulsory is something we should ask Bo Jo.
Agreed. However, I was simply correcting the previous poster's assertion about the population of the City of London.
If only someone, somewhere, would hurry up and invent double or even triple glazing. And then set up a system of generous grants so that those living bang in the centre of one of the world's richest cities could afford to buy and install it on their subsistence level wages.
Aside from the point made elsewhere that there are residents in the Ćity, HGVs don't magically appear at its edges - they've got to travel through other areas to get there, which would similarly suffer from noise.
Then restrict lorries to the main routes in and out of the centre - busy roads like the A1 & A12 where you pretty much expect 24/7 traffic anyway.
Utilise the river more. Have a central dock where barges can be loaded & unloaded onto trucks (and tipper trucks can offload their contents) to take them the minimal distance possible on the roads.
All this is possible with a little lateral thinking
That's true everywhere in the world. I've stayed in hotel's in Munich with building work going on all around at night.
You have to separate the two types of noise: there's the concentrated, immobile din of a building site, which is certainly not compatible with nearby residents during the night or early morning. But, as noted, there are very few residents in the City of London. There are lots of building sites though.
The noise of heavy trucks simply on their way to a site isn't much. Many main routes in London are busy from very early until very late and motorbikes and buses are far noisier than trucks (as I've learned).
Each case should be considered on its merits. Some don't have nearby residents. Some goods can be delivered quietly and don't need to arrive at a very specific time.
Basically I think all traffic should be slowed down in built up areas.
The idea of only allowing trucks in towns / city centres at certain times doesn't sit well with me as it only moves the problem to those other times.
My assumption that a reduction in speed for all vehicles is only one part of the equation to reducing cyclist deaths but it surely has to be one of the many issues that has to be dealt with.
With the average speed of vehicles in London being less than 20mph anyway it makes sense from a safety point of view to regulate the speed to 20mph all over London.
The law should be made that future motor vehicles should be fitted with intelligent speed adaptation devices where the cars read the 20mph speed limit and reduces the vehicles speed limit automatically. This should be happening now and I even argue that that speed limit when intelligent car regulators are fitted should be reduced to even slower speeds than 20mph.
Needless to say in the future (not that far off) driverless cars where the speed limit is automatically controlled is on its way so we should be designing inner city road layouts ready for these new technologies.
Some may argue that vehicles with speed limiters offer up a potential for other safety issues i.e. where you can't speed up to avoid an accident but if all vehicles have a reduced speed it may not stop accidents but it will reduced the potential carnage that excessive speed produces.
The majority if not all accidents (excusing acts of god, if you believe in that sort of thing) are the result of driver error, or even cyclist error or just bad road sense in general . So if everybody is moving slower those errors are much easier to deal with and corrected before collision happens.
Don't get me wrong reducing the speed is not the only issue. Bad driving (and bad cycling) is the root cause and that should be tackled as well as the speed people drive.
Which brings me to the issue of attitudes of people when they get in a vehicle or ride a bicycle.
There are some that get in a motor vehicle that seemingly think because they have the ability to go faster than other road users like cyclists or horse riders, that they have more rights and should be allowed to act in different ways when on the road, to the point of endangering the lives of other road users just so they can go faster.
There needs to be more done at the learner driver stage to educate drivers about safety and etiquette.
Anyway I could go on about the psychology of why some personality types should have more work done on them at the learner stage to ensure the safety of other drivers once they have passed their driving test but I'd probably only be expressing a rather biased attitude which wouldn't help the present situation. I would say though that something needs to be done about making it harder for people to pass their test that are going to be driving big lorries buses and even taxis.
I don't know if you have noticed but years ago there was a feeling that taxi drivers, bus drivers and to some extent HGV drivers were regarded as being more experienced and more professional in their driving abilities. These days whether there is a pressure on those drivers to do everything faster because of modern day dead lines I don't know, but as a cyclist and a car driver I do feel the standard of even supposed professional drivers has declined, of course the same could be said for attitudes and awareness of safety issues of some cyclists who ride through red lights with ear phones fitted etc etc.
Maybe there does need to be a HGV ban at certain times initially but it's really not going to solve the problem, it will merely reduced the risk at some points in the day and potentially grow the risks for cyclist in other parts of the day. Although making any noise about this situation is good and hopefully make more experienced policy makers think about what can really be done.
Next time you see a cyclist going through a red light or under taking big lorries on the inside left at junctions etc make it your mission to point out their dangerous manoeuvre. You might get grief for it (so act with caution) but you might save a life in the future as well. As cyclists we have to sort out our own community as well if we are going to improve safety on our roads.
Hope I have made some sensible points
for others to think about /discuss. Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong.
@Rupert, whilst I agree everyone needs to slow down, the majority of the cyclist deaths in London this year are from HGVs turning left at slow speed.
5mph is too fast if a HGV driver doesn't see a cyclist.
Absolutely! And bring the grief I say, you could save a life.
Part of the reason people continuously do things like this is no-one calls them out on it, so they build up a false 'nothing will happen to me' invincibility shield.
Just this morning: Woman running the red lights at the junction with Southwark Street and Borough High Street; Man (literally) squeezing between a bus and the pavement at the same lights; Man getting off his bike but still walking in the road (!) through a red light to turn left onto Southwark Bridge; Man in a suit on a Boris Bike. No helmet. Texting.
Madness.
Except that running red lights is likely to keep you out of trouble with lorries.
And that particular junction if you're joining Borough High St from Southwark Street you'd be foolish not to jump the lights to get away from the other left-turning traffic.
Plus getting off your bike and walking through lights is legal. As is wearing a suit, without a helmet. As is texting if you are paying proper attention to the road, although this is a bit of a grey area.
Yes point out that going inside a lorry is dangerous. But not sure what response you're going to get for annoying people doing sensible and legal things. To save myself the time if you catch up with me on the road: fuck off.
I agree with most of that but texting whilst still moving on a road is illegal. How can you be 'paying proper attention to the road' if your texting? or are you using the Van driver defence see: http://road.cc/content/news/146797-ban-drivers-who-text-behind-wheel-say...
Running red lights 'to keep you out of trouble with lorries' is a pathetic excuse for not being aware of your position or surroundings while on the road.
Doing the same to get away from the other turning left traffic is also rubbish as (in both cases today) the traffic is already stopped.
While not wearing a helmet and texting while riding aren't illegal (really? find me a motorist fan on that one) it still goes back to the original point of not putting yourself at risk. You pay proper attention to the road or you stop, there's no doing both at the same time; who the hell are you kidding, besides yourself.
I said Bus, not lorry. Different size, same potential outcome.
I wouldn't actually annoy people for doing sensible and legal things, only stupid and illegal things, but thanks for missing that.
Thanks also for your thought-out advance response too. Be sure to shout though as I'm not sure I'll hear you through the Ambulance doors.
Really? I don't think you've ever been on a bike in central London if you don't think this will help keep you safe.
Soooooo, the traffic is stopped and yet you're arrogant enough to go through the red light and claim it makes you more safe.
Enjoy your ride to the cemetery.
I hate to say it, but Johnson has a point. Wolmar is right in implicitly criticising Lammy for a headline grabber.
A rush hour ban would be shifting the problem into other times and other cyclists and pedestrians. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen (there may be fewer cyclists around at other times), but it is about seven on the list of things which can and should be done to reduce lorry danger.
There is a range of solutions which require implementing, namely...:" See "HGV problem in context" http://rdrf.org.uk/2015/06/04/scania-trucks-keeping-children-safe-whats-...
No trucks after 6am works well in New York and other US cities, shops still get food and life continues. They tried something similar during the Olympics and it was bliss for 3 weeks! You just plan around it. The considerate contractor rules and the like exist and work well. People hate change, but its rarely a bad thing, but you have to push people through the change curve apparently...
I'm disappointed with Boris's response on ITV. We know that HGV's can operate within restricted hours ... because that's what actually happens in many other cities in the world.
We also know that construction vehicles when on-site are heavily supervised by a number of banksmen. Yet on the roads they are not.
Why not have a banksman in the passenger seat, whose sole job it is to monitor the left-hand side of the vehicle, at all times within central London?
It would be effective, it wouldn't cost public money and it could be implemented quickly. Within weeks or months. I'd like to see in-cab CCTV too so that, in the event of an accident, we could see how the driver and the banksman were doing their job.
If we'd have had 7 construction workers killed this year, by construction vehicles whilst on-site, I'm pretty sure that such measures would be swiftly implemented.
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