Kennington-cross: No joined-up thinking on CS7

The first two Cycle Superhighways launch on 19 July, and they're progressing by leaps and bounds.

Which is a shame, because they're supposed to be smooth and continuous.


Take this example. You're heading north-east up Kennington Park Road, just past the Oval cricket ground (top three, and bottom two, pics).

The blue paint is down already. This is evidently the final shape of this part of Superficial Cycleway 7, Merton to City.

Here's what Mark Knox, a chap who trusts his eyes and ears rather than TfL hype, said about it on the Lambeth Cyclists e-group a couple of days ago:


It seems that the engineers, acknowledging that there is no safe way, in the present road layout, for cyclists to make the straight-ahead movement, have decided not to commit themselves by recommending a way.

So the superhighway hugs the pavement up to the bus stop by the parade of shops, vanishes, then magically reappears about 80 yards on in the centre of the road. Between those two points it is presumably every cyclist for themselves, as you fling yourself across a lane of speeding traffic.

The superhighways have been sold as "safe, continuous routes". Here, at the most hazardous point of the entire northbound route, this one seems neither safe nor continuous.

Personally, making that straight-ahead movement, I would always get myself in the right lane at the start of the junction and stay there, making my intentions as clear as possible to other road-users. Most cyclists I observed this morning were doing that, rather than following the paint.


The CSs are not even 'just a blue stripe'. In many places - such as Narrow St (right) on Superficial Cycleway 3, Barking Mad to the Bloody Tower Gateway - they're a disjointed series of hopscotch squares.

So - for the millionth time - what is the point of the Superficial Cycleways?


They add no new safety features. (Some bits of the existing bike routes, such as Cable St and the Elephant and Castle by-pass, have been smoothed, resurfaced, and slightly widened in very short stretches. And that's good, thanks - but that's all stuff that should have been done anyway.)


They're not continuous. (They stop wherever there's a bus stop or a parking space - that parked car is there quite legitimately.)

They have no legal force - they are not mandatory or even advisory lanes, except where those were in operation already.

So what are they?

Well, like a cobalt-coloured spray-on tan, they're a well-marketed cosmetic. Rating for branding and marketing: 9/10. Rating as cycle facility: 2/10.

Uncommon problems at Clapham junction

What would the person on the Clapham omnibus think about this? This junction has been exercising a few minds on the Lambeth Cyclists e-group.

It's the end of Cedars Rd, heading south towards the edge of Clapham Common. Motor traffic can only turn left (left lane) or right (right lane), but cyclists can go straight on, taking a recognised, signed cycle path across the Common. There's a nice prominent ASL, and without traffic it looks pretty straightforward (right).



But the traffic lights have recently been changed to add a left-filter, which kicks in several seconds before the general green (right).



So if you're going straight on, and you've positioned yourself in the ASL at red anywhere except the far right-hand side (a natural thing to do if you don't know the junction, with the entry to the ASL being on the left - see picture right), you're in trouble: left-filtering traffic behind you will be hooting you to get out the way, and hustling past. It's a nasty little example of designed-in conflict.

You can't solve it by adding a straight-ahead cycle filter simultaneous with the left-filter, because there's left-to-right sideways traffic in front of you in that phase.

You could add symbols to the ASL, splitting it into two with a prominent left arrow in the left half, and straight-on-and-right arrows in the right, but that might be thought too complicated. Similarly, you could redraw the ASL half-size as a box at the top of the right-hand lane, though again that might be thought confusing.



Or you could just acknowledge your mistake and remove the left filter.

Or you could solve it the London way (right): render the ASL unusable by having traffic routinely block it anyway.

Can't read, can't drive, but can swear a little

So here you are, cycling along Kennington Park Road - aka the A3 - northwestish towards the Elephant and Castle.

You want to turn right at the lights just in front of Kennington Underground station, into Braganza Street.


So you take the centre of the lane and signal.


When the lights change, you wait for a gap in the oncoming traffic to turn right.


There's a clear sign at the left saying the bus lane only works in rush hour. This junction is clogged with cars, buses and fluorescent cycle commuters in rush hour. But this is outside rush hour, on a Saturday lunchtime, so straight-ahead traffic is perfectly at liberty to use the bus lane to pass you safely. And there are no buses in sight.

The observant driver would see the sign and do just that. And the unobservant but patient driver would wait calmly while you turned right, just as they would for a car.


Sadly, the observant driver in London must have been away for the weekend with the unobservant but patient driver. At this junction, cyclists waiting to turn right get passed at speed dangerously close, hooted and sworn at.

It's a sad illustration of several things.

First, driving in London is not easy. There are a lot of road signs to read. An average copy of the Sun probably has fewer words than the amount of roadsign literature the driver has to read every minute.

Second, bus lanes change their exclusion of cars from 24-hour to rush-hour only abruptly and inconsistently, you can be fined £120 for driving in one when you shouldn't, and you can understand drivers erring on the side of financial caution and staying out of them when in doubt. Though they rarely seem in doubt as to when to use the horn.

But third, it also shows just how impatient, rude and dangerous some drivers get behind the wheel. No matter that your manoeuvre is quite legitimate; no matter that they can't read simple road signs. You're in their way.

Anyway, if you do manage to turn right unscathed here, we recommend the No 1 Off Licence. The guys in there are friendly and always having good-natured banter about football, and after your experiences you might need a can of something.

Cycle Superhighways: safe as Bank of, er, Iceland

The Transport for London website has a nice new page with more details about the forthcoming Cycle Superhighways - the express cycle lanes which, it is confidently expected, will double the amount of cycle blogging in the capital.

The page indexes all 12 routes at a glance with their pretend start and finish dates. For the two routes opening this summer - Barking to Tower Gateway CS3, and Merton to Bank CS7 - there are also route maps and schedules of works.

There are also some artist's impressions (right) of what the routes will look like, which immediately contradict the assertions lower down the page that the routes will be 'direct and continuous'. (David Hembrow's blog analyses the impressionable artist's work in more detail. He's as unimpressed as we are.)


This is a more accurate impression (right) of how the routes will actually look.

The Superficial Cycleways are already a standing joke in cycling circles. But cycle campaigners are used to going round in circles.

It's not a particularly funny joke, though. Because there are many places where, we suspect, safety issues will be submerged beneath the B&Q emulsion.


Take, for example, the junction on the right. The cyclist is going west along the A24/A3, Kennington Road, just passing the fork left to Brixton Road. (The Oval cricket ground is just a Eoin Morgan reverse-sweep away to the north.) He wants to go straight on, towards Stockwell.

Now, at the moment, this is lethal. You can see why. From the previous junction, either you go along in the bus lane and then try to cut across a lane of fast-moving traffic; or you stay in the left of the middle, straight-on, lane, sandwiched between two lanes of fast-moving traffic.

And this is on Superficial Cycleway 3, Merton to Bank. So surely they'll sort it out, to make it 'safe and continuous'?

Maybe. Maybe not. The schedule notes provided on that TfL web page are unclear. All they talk about is "rearranging southbound traffic lanes... This will make it safer for cyclists".

Posting to the Lambeth Cyclists egroup about the "evil Oval", local cyclist Mark Knox said: "When some of us rode the route with the engineers and planners, we gave them all sorts of advice about this huge obstacle to easy cycling. One of our favoured options was restricting the left-turning Brixton/Camberwell-bound slip road to buses and cycles, and requiring all other traffic to carry on to the crossroads.

"What we stressed was that unless something radical was done to calm this junction, no route through it could be called a cycle superhighway. Sadly there is no mention of any measures to civilise the possibly even more perilous northbound straight-ahead journey through the junction."

Will such re-engineering happen? It's possible, just as it's possible that Lord Ashcroft might move in next door to us. But all we expect is a glossy strip of Dulux Caribbean Midnight. The great Cycle Superhighways Swindle. A bluewash.