that's a very astute observation. A 'Strategy' that concerns itself only with tactics clearly has an ironclad ideology it's not prepared to talk about.
What's the leopard thing, by the way?
TfL Draft Network Operating Strategy
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What's the leopard thing, by the way?
Two pictures I like in that respect:
What happens if a pedestrian were to take up as much space as a person in a car.
The relative road space taken up by the same number of people using different modes of transport.
Now if they want to improve the flow on the roads it seems obvious to me which transport mode needs to go.
Tommi - you have quite made my day!
Can I ask you to just click on this.............................. http://1to3saintpetersstreet.blogspot.com/
albion
Guru
- Location
- South Tyneside
When you fly into Malta catching a bus now means a 'London bendy bus'.Seems bizarre but I also thought getting rid of them was just expensive populism.
I'd not really intended to respond, but this thread was tweeted by London Cyclist, which kind of imposed a duty. So, it's rushed, but pretty much covers the bases that I wanted to cover. Some of it is down to Stowie and Tommi, and I hope that, if they have sent in responses, they've achieved something a little more elegant than what follows.........
Where does this lobotomy make its mark? Let us start with this sentence, on page 4.
London’s roads comprise some of the Capital’s most important public spaces
......which is unarguably correct. Scroll down, however, and there is a small, but significant shift
This means creating streets and public spaces that are safe, attractive and accessible as well as providing the corridors along which traffic flows.
Consequently, it is imperative that the road network functions effectively both as a set of corridors for traffic movement and as a collection of places in which people live, work and play.
Now here’s the problem. Those two objectives do not, as the song has it, go together like love and marriage. They may even be at odds with each other. There’s certainly no guarantee that a street that has smooth-flowing traffic is a good place to live, work, play, or, indeed, worship or run a business.
Turn to page 5, and, we read this.......
How will we know we are being successful in our approach? When Londoners get in their cars, on the bus, cycle or walk to their destinations, they will reliably know how long their journey will take them, they will be assured that they can get there safely and they will travel through some of the world’s best-designed and maintained streets and public spaces.
So, in two pages, we have gone from ‘important public spaces’ to a system of measurement that is about travelling time.
This isn’t just wrong – it’s observably wrong. Let’s take a real-life example. The A24 is, by any reasonable measure, a success story. Clapham High Street is prosperous, with local businesses doing well. The footpaths are well used. Upper Tooting Road sports a boisterous mix of local businesses, and is host to all kinds of socialising. Both Clapham High Street and Upper Tooting Road are convivial places. People recognise each other, and spend time with one another in the street. On the other hand......traffic does not flow smoothly. Far from it. It can take twenty minutes to drive a car from Tooting Broadway to Tooting Bec, and, on a good day, one’s progress will be slowed by cars crossing from east to west, pedestrians crossing with, apparently, little fear of traffic and car drivers halting to conduct conversations with pedestrians. As a trunk road the A24 is a mess. As a place where people live, work, play, worship and do business it’s doing just nicely.
A comparison with the A23 Streatham High Road is enlightening. Traffic flows at a faster rate, often a much faster rate, but, even after the most timid of ‘makeovers’, Streatham High Road is still a fetid, noisy tarmac canyon, besieged from within by the motor car. Traffic divides the east side of the street from the west side. Pedestrians are few in number. Empty shops abound.
Let us now return to consideration of TfL’s lobotomy and jump forward to page 63
However, these more strategic measures are not the focus of this document, which concentrates on the range of more locally targeted measures that can be applied at specific locations on the road network (eg the CMAs) to provide localised traffic demand relief to improve reliability and/or network resilience. TfL’s approach to these more tactical elements of travel demand management work is focused on:
• Key corridors of high demand (eg the CMAs)
• Key traffic pinch points, valves and hotspots on the TLRN and SRN
Here’s the rub. A strategic document that doesn’t concern itself with strategy. A strategic document that sets out palliative measures for a condition that it makes no attempt to understand, let alone get to grips with.
Back, now, to chapter two which neatly betrays TfL’s miniscule panorama of considerations.
Recent (unpublished) national research, conducted by MVA Consultancy on behalf of the former Commission for Integrated Transport and Motorists’ Forum, suggests that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to motorists include:
• Journey times and speeds
• Journey time reliability
Traffic delays
• Road works
• Potholes
• Safety
And
Road network operational outcomes: Managing congestion, smoothing traffic flow and improving peoples’ perceptions is therefore a complex issue, made up of a number of related factors including:
• Journey time and/or traffic speeds
• Journey time reliability
• Volume of demand
• Network capacity and availability including the amount of disruption to road capacity through planned or unplanned events or interventions on the network (eg highway or public utility road works, collisions, breakdowns and special events)
• Network resilience – the ability to withstand the impacts of the planned or unplanned events outlined above (through traffic diversion to alternative routes) or other types of disruption including weather-related events (eg ice, snow or flooding)
So, here we have it. Success is a reliable journey time for the motorist. Not, mark you for the bus passenger. And, hilariously, no mention at all of the very people who can most accurately predict their journey times – pedestrians and cyclists. Indeed, if ever there was an opportunity missed, it is in not asking the question ‘what do pedestrians and cyclists know that motorists do not?’ A rush hour journey from Streatham Hill to Islington might take 30 minutes by car, or it might take 75 minutes. The same journey by public transport might take 45 minutes or it might take 55 minutes. The same journey will take a 50 year old woman with a medium level of fitness on a decent bicycle between 40 and 50 minutes. A man of 56 with a good level of fitness on a road bicycle will take between 30 and 35 minutes. The car driver while delaying the commercial and bus traffic on which London depends is, besides, taking an avoidable punt on his or her journey time. That’s the rub - TfL’s ‘strategy’ is a series of band-aids designed for the benefit of the not-so-clever end of the commuting market.
And so it goes on. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 are a traffic nerd’s paradise of ‘facts’ and figures, all vainly attempting to provide an answer to the questions that the lobotomised TfL can’t be troubled to ask. There are graphs, tables and acronyms that should, properly, be confined to teenage boys congregating on the internet. In the 1980s Rubik’s Cube enthusiasts wore sweatbands on their wrists to assure themselves of their puzzle-solving abilities – we now know where these lost souls ended up.............
Be that as it may, let’s move on to what is the greatest of this document’s many shortcomings. There’s no sign of the biggest, best question.....what makes traffic? It’s apparent that, for all the surveying, traffic is seen as a natural function of the city. There is no analysis, let alone theory of traffic. There’s no appreciation, and absolutely no interest in how urban form, settlement, planning, land values or might generate traffic, or, conversely, reduce it. The passage quoted above from page 63 succeeds some words on managing demand and modal shift.
Here’s the thing. Let’s stop referring to ‘corridors’ and consider the streets that TfL seek to manage as ‘high streets’ – as places where people live, work, play, worship, do business, recognise each other, spend time with each other and think of as central to their lives.
We have a planning system that has, since 1948, pushed dwellings outward. We have, collectively, set our face against the regeneration of high streets, not least by insisting that a late nineteenth and early twentieth century format be retained, and, in sticking to this format, discouraged the concentration of dwellings within walking distance of high streets. We have, thanks to the egregious PPG24, determined that high streets are, apparently, unfit for habitation.
That same planning system has undermined high streets and shopping parades, (and the short journeys high streets generate), by allowing the proliferation of out-of-centre retail development with large car parks. The cars that stream to these car parks offer nothing to the high streets that TfL attempts to manage, other than to make them less and less manageable.
Let’s ask ourselves if the person driving a car from Croydon to London Bridge offers anything to Streatham High Road, and, if not, wonder if attempting in vain to smooth his or her progress has any purpose other than to jam the road, slowing commercial traffic and buses, make streets less congenial and reduce the prosperity of businesses along the A23. Let’s ask ourselves if the person driving to Tesco or Sainsbury, is doing anything other than turning foot journeys to high streets and shopping parades in to car journeys, and, in doing so, contributing to the decay of high streets.
Having done that, let’s return to the document....
We greet the appearance of the London Bus in chapter 7 with a sigh of relief. The document could not be more explicit.
7.3 The role of buses and bus priority measures
London’s buses have undergone significant growth over the past decade as a result of a wide range of measures aimed at: improving journey times and reliability; upgrading vehicles, infrastructure and information systems; improving safety, security and accessibility; and consequently improving customer satisfaction. As a result the Capital’s buses now carry 2.2 billion passengers a year, the highest level since 1967. This represents 20 per cent of the daily modal share of journeys in London – double the share of the Underground. Buses are not only an important part of the Capital’s transport system but also a very efficient means of moving people around the road network thereby addressing areas of high travel demand, especially in areas where alternative forms of public transport are scarce.
What could be more straightforward.? Big up the bus! But...........
The performance of buses is closely linked with, and reliant upon, the operational performance of the road network on which they run.
Not so good. We’ve already seen how performance is to be measured, and, by the sound of it, there’s no recognition that the convenience of the bus passenger might be an entirely different thing to the convenience of the motorist.
This tends to coincide with the main strategic roads and corridors. Buses are a key consideration in the operation of the network and their people-carrying ability has led to the development and implementation of ‘bus priority’ measures. These measures help to reduce bus journey times, improve reliability and increase the efficiency of the bus network, especially when considered as part of a ‘whole route’ approach. Bus priority measures are systematically identified, appraised and delivered at key locations including town centres and their approaches, at new development sites, and links where bus passengers represent a significant proportion of all road users.
Well, sort of. The basic idea is good. Ken Livingstone decided that waiting for mass transit nirvana in the form of trams and trains would be a lengthy business, and the wholesale revamping of the bus network during his time at City Hall, with more buses travelling more reliably, and indicators on bus stops removing the delicious uncertainty of bus travel succeeded to such a degree that our bus system is far superior to that of Paris, Rome, Madrid, Manchester or even New York.
Typical bus priority measures include bus-only roads, bus lanes and selective vehicle detection at traffic signals. These are some of the essential tools needed to ensure the limited people-carrying capacity of the road network is being used most effectively.
On London’s SRN (including the TLRN) a significant amount of bus-priority infrastructure is already in place and delivering daily benefits.
Who could argue with this? If anything it undersells the success of bus lanes, which, perhaps unintentionally, hosted London’s bicycle boom following the failure of the startlingly expensive LCN+
The challenge going forward will be to maintain, and in targeted locations improve, bus reliability whilst recognising the need to balance other considerations and objectives on the network such as safety, walking, cycling, freight servicing and smoothing general traffic flow.
One gets the impression that this paragraph leaves a lot unsaid. One imagines that it was fought over, or, at least, one hopes that it was fought over. Before picking it apart, let’s turn again, to a real-life example....
The driver of a commercial vehicle travelling along the A3 from Oval to the Elephant and Castle, and on to the City probably doesn’t have a great deal of choice, and must sit in the right hand lane, listening to the radio, perhaps humming a tune or pondering the day ahead, but, in contrast, an individual can travel by tube, bus, bike, on foot, or in a car. It’s much the same on the A404, the A10, the A11, the A200, the A202 and a host of radial routes. Now it might be that those choosing to travel by car have come a long way, but, then again, the alternatives to car travel extend a long way out.......
The paragraph quoted above lists considerations. Safety, one imagines, is a general thing, although quite how bus priority measures affect safety isn’t explained. The following four considerations are categories, and walking, cycling and freight speak for themselves. ‘General traffic flow’ is a different thing, and the words betray, yet again, the aporia that is fundamental to this document. ‘General’ covers a multitude of sins, and, just possibly, some virtues, but, judging by the metrics set out in previous chapters; it is likely that the traffic offers less benefit than nuisance to the streets on which it travels, and, perversely, to itself.
Show us the profit, TfL. We can show you the loss, in dirty, noisy streets and boarded up shops. We can show you the price in decaying flats over shops. We can show you the foolishness of traffic at a standstill for no discernible benefit.
All the smoothing, all the management, all the clever acronyms in the world will not recover our streets, will not make London more congenial, more healthy or more prosperous. Give yourselves a break from the tedium of SCOOT and consider how those cars came to be there in the first place. Ask the obvious question – if it takes 30 minutes to cycle and anything from 25 to 50 minutes to drive, what is the cause of ‘unpredictability’? Come out of the shell you’ve constructed of tables and graphs and give yourself a bit of space to think about the kind of lives people live by the side of the roads you so conspicuously fail to manage. In short.........dump this miserable, purblind, ignorant document and start again.
Response to TfL Draft Network Operating Strategy
This is a miserable document. TfL used to think about streets, and what they might be. No longer. Reading the Draft Network Operating Strategy is a little like meeting at an old friend, lately lobotomised. There is so much that could be said, and yet there seems so little point.Where does this lobotomy make its mark? Let us start with this sentence, on page 4.
London’s roads comprise some of the Capital’s most important public spaces
......which is unarguably correct. Scroll down, however, and there is a small, but significant shift
This means creating streets and public spaces that are safe, attractive and accessible as well as providing the corridors along which traffic flows.
Consequently, it is imperative that the road network functions effectively both as a set of corridors for traffic movement and as a collection of places in which people live, work and play.
Now here’s the problem. Those two objectives do not, as the song has it, go together like love and marriage. They may even be at odds with each other. There’s certainly no guarantee that a street that has smooth-flowing traffic is a good place to live, work, play, or, indeed, worship or run a business.
Turn to page 5, and, we read this.......
How will we know we are being successful in our approach? When Londoners get in their cars, on the bus, cycle or walk to their destinations, they will reliably know how long their journey will take them, they will be assured that they can get there safely and they will travel through some of the world’s best-designed and maintained streets and public spaces.
So, in two pages, we have gone from ‘important public spaces’ to a system of measurement that is about travelling time.
This isn’t just wrong – it’s observably wrong. Let’s take a real-life example. The A24 is, by any reasonable measure, a success story. Clapham High Street is prosperous, with local businesses doing well. The footpaths are well used. Upper Tooting Road sports a boisterous mix of local businesses, and is host to all kinds of socialising. Both Clapham High Street and Upper Tooting Road are convivial places. People recognise each other, and spend time with one another in the street. On the other hand......traffic does not flow smoothly. Far from it. It can take twenty minutes to drive a car from Tooting Broadway to Tooting Bec, and, on a good day, one’s progress will be slowed by cars crossing from east to west, pedestrians crossing with, apparently, little fear of traffic and car drivers halting to conduct conversations with pedestrians. As a trunk road the A24 is a mess. As a place where people live, work, play, worship and do business it’s doing just nicely.
A comparison with the A23 Streatham High Road is enlightening. Traffic flows at a faster rate, often a much faster rate, but, even after the most timid of ‘makeovers’, Streatham High Road is still a fetid, noisy tarmac canyon, besieged from within by the motor car. Traffic divides the east side of the street from the west side. Pedestrians are few in number. Empty shops abound.
Let us now return to consideration of TfL’s lobotomy and jump forward to page 63
However, these more strategic measures are not the focus of this document, which concentrates on the range of more locally targeted measures that can be applied at specific locations on the road network (eg the CMAs) to provide localised traffic demand relief to improve reliability and/or network resilience. TfL’s approach to these more tactical elements of travel demand management work is focused on:
• Key corridors of high demand (eg the CMAs)
• Key traffic pinch points, valves and hotspots on the TLRN and SRN
Here’s the rub. A strategic document that doesn’t concern itself with strategy. A strategic document that sets out palliative measures for a condition that it makes no attempt to understand, let alone get to grips with.
Back, now, to chapter two which neatly betrays TfL’s miniscule panorama of considerations.
Recent (unpublished) national research, conducted by MVA Consultancy on behalf of the former Commission for Integrated Transport and Motorists’ Forum, suggests that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to motorists include:
• Journey times and speeds
• Journey time reliability
Traffic delays
• Road works
• Potholes
• Safety
And
Road network operational outcomes: Managing congestion, smoothing traffic flow and improving peoples’ perceptions is therefore a complex issue, made up of a number of related factors including:
• Journey time and/or traffic speeds
• Journey time reliability
• Volume of demand
• Network capacity and availability including the amount of disruption to road capacity through planned or unplanned events or interventions on the network (eg highway or public utility road works, collisions, breakdowns and special events)
• Network resilience – the ability to withstand the impacts of the planned or unplanned events outlined above (through traffic diversion to alternative routes) or other types of disruption including weather-related events (eg ice, snow or flooding)
So, here we have it. Success is a reliable journey time for the motorist. Not, mark you for the bus passenger. And, hilariously, no mention at all of the very people who can most accurately predict their journey times – pedestrians and cyclists. Indeed, if ever there was an opportunity missed, it is in not asking the question ‘what do pedestrians and cyclists know that motorists do not?’ A rush hour journey from Streatham Hill to Islington might take 30 minutes by car, or it might take 75 minutes. The same journey by public transport might take 45 minutes or it might take 55 minutes. The same journey will take a 50 year old woman with a medium level of fitness on a decent bicycle between 40 and 50 minutes. A man of 56 with a good level of fitness on a road bicycle will take between 30 and 35 minutes. The car driver while delaying the commercial and bus traffic on which London depends is, besides, taking an avoidable punt on his or her journey time. That’s the rub - TfL’s ‘strategy’ is a series of band-aids designed for the benefit of the not-so-clever end of the commuting market.
And so it goes on. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 are a traffic nerd’s paradise of ‘facts’ and figures, all vainly attempting to provide an answer to the questions that the lobotomised TfL can’t be troubled to ask. There are graphs, tables and acronyms that should, properly, be confined to teenage boys congregating on the internet. In the 1980s Rubik’s Cube enthusiasts wore sweatbands on their wrists to assure themselves of their puzzle-solving abilities – we now know where these lost souls ended up.............
Be that as it may, let’s move on to what is the greatest of this document’s many shortcomings. There’s no sign of the biggest, best question.....what makes traffic? It’s apparent that, for all the surveying, traffic is seen as a natural function of the city. There is no analysis, let alone theory of traffic. There’s no appreciation, and absolutely no interest in how urban form, settlement, planning, land values or might generate traffic, or, conversely, reduce it. The passage quoted above from page 63 succeeds some words on managing demand and modal shift.
Here’s the thing. Let’s stop referring to ‘corridors’ and consider the streets that TfL seek to manage as ‘high streets’ – as places where people live, work, play, worship, do business, recognise each other, spend time with each other and think of as central to their lives.
We have a planning system that has, since 1948, pushed dwellings outward. We have, collectively, set our face against the regeneration of high streets, not least by insisting that a late nineteenth and early twentieth century format be retained, and, in sticking to this format, discouraged the concentration of dwellings within walking distance of high streets. We have, thanks to the egregious PPG24, determined that high streets are, apparently, unfit for habitation.
That same planning system has undermined high streets and shopping parades, (and the short journeys high streets generate), by allowing the proliferation of out-of-centre retail development with large car parks. The cars that stream to these car parks offer nothing to the high streets that TfL attempts to manage, other than to make them less and less manageable.
Let’s ask ourselves if the person driving a car from Croydon to London Bridge offers anything to Streatham High Road, and, if not, wonder if attempting in vain to smooth his or her progress has any purpose other than to jam the road, slowing commercial traffic and buses, make streets less congenial and reduce the prosperity of businesses along the A23. Let’s ask ourselves if the person driving to Tesco or Sainsbury, is doing anything other than turning foot journeys to high streets and shopping parades in to car journeys, and, in doing so, contributing to the decay of high streets.
Having done that, let’s return to the document....
We greet the appearance of the London Bus in chapter 7 with a sigh of relief. The document could not be more explicit.
7.3 The role of buses and bus priority measures
London’s buses have undergone significant growth over the past decade as a result of a wide range of measures aimed at: improving journey times and reliability; upgrading vehicles, infrastructure and information systems; improving safety, security and accessibility; and consequently improving customer satisfaction. As a result the Capital’s buses now carry 2.2 billion passengers a year, the highest level since 1967. This represents 20 per cent of the daily modal share of journeys in London – double the share of the Underground. Buses are not only an important part of the Capital’s transport system but also a very efficient means of moving people around the road network thereby addressing areas of high travel demand, especially in areas where alternative forms of public transport are scarce.
What could be more straightforward.? Big up the bus! But...........
The performance of buses is closely linked with, and reliant upon, the operational performance of the road network on which they run.
Not so good. We’ve already seen how performance is to be measured, and, by the sound of it, there’s no recognition that the convenience of the bus passenger might be an entirely different thing to the convenience of the motorist.
This tends to coincide with the main strategic roads and corridors. Buses are a key consideration in the operation of the network and their people-carrying ability has led to the development and implementation of ‘bus priority’ measures. These measures help to reduce bus journey times, improve reliability and increase the efficiency of the bus network, especially when considered as part of a ‘whole route’ approach. Bus priority measures are systematically identified, appraised and delivered at key locations including town centres and their approaches, at new development sites, and links where bus passengers represent a significant proportion of all road users.
Well, sort of. The basic idea is good. Ken Livingstone decided that waiting for mass transit nirvana in the form of trams and trains would be a lengthy business, and the wholesale revamping of the bus network during his time at City Hall, with more buses travelling more reliably, and indicators on bus stops removing the delicious uncertainty of bus travel succeeded to such a degree that our bus system is far superior to that of Paris, Rome, Madrid, Manchester or even New York.
Typical bus priority measures include bus-only roads, bus lanes and selective vehicle detection at traffic signals. These are some of the essential tools needed to ensure the limited people-carrying capacity of the road network is being used most effectively.
On London’s SRN (including the TLRN) a significant amount of bus-priority infrastructure is already in place and delivering daily benefits.
Who could argue with this? If anything it undersells the success of bus lanes, which, perhaps unintentionally, hosted London’s bicycle boom following the failure of the startlingly expensive LCN+
The challenge going forward will be to maintain, and in targeted locations improve, bus reliability whilst recognising the need to balance other considerations and objectives on the network such as safety, walking, cycling, freight servicing and smoothing general traffic flow.
One gets the impression that this paragraph leaves a lot unsaid. One imagines that it was fought over, or, at least, one hopes that it was fought over. Before picking it apart, let’s turn again, to a real-life example....
The driver of a commercial vehicle travelling along the A3 from Oval to the Elephant and Castle, and on to the City probably doesn’t have a great deal of choice, and must sit in the right hand lane, listening to the radio, perhaps humming a tune or pondering the day ahead, but, in contrast, an individual can travel by tube, bus, bike, on foot, or in a car. It’s much the same on the A404, the A10, the A11, the A200, the A202 and a host of radial routes. Now it might be that those choosing to travel by car have come a long way, but, then again, the alternatives to car travel extend a long way out.......
The paragraph quoted above lists considerations. Safety, one imagines, is a general thing, although quite how bus priority measures affect safety isn’t explained. The following four considerations are categories, and walking, cycling and freight speak for themselves. ‘General traffic flow’ is a different thing, and the words betray, yet again, the aporia that is fundamental to this document. ‘General’ covers a multitude of sins, and, just possibly, some virtues, but, judging by the metrics set out in previous chapters; it is likely that the traffic offers less benefit than nuisance to the streets on which it travels, and, perversely, to itself.
Show us the profit, TfL. We can show you the loss, in dirty, noisy streets and boarded up shops. We can show you the price in decaying flats over shops. We can show you the foolishness of traffic at a standstill for no discernible benefit.
All the smoothing, all the management, all the clever acronyms in the world will not recover our streets, will not make London more congenial, more healthy or more prosperous. Give yourselves a break from the tedium of SCOOT and consider how those cars came to be there in the first place. Ask the obvious question – if it takes 30 minutes to cycle and anything from 25 to 50 minutes to drive, what is the cause of ‘unpredictability’? Come out of the shell you’ve constructed of tables and graphs and give yourself a bit of space to think about the kind of lives people live by the side of the roads you so conspicuously fail to manage. In short.........dump this miserable, purblind, ignorant document and start again.
stumbled across this today https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/roads/road-safety-plan
Ends 31st Oct
