Bollo said:
Thanks O. Despite my tendency to sarcasm this was a (fairly) serious question. I was wondering if any infrastructure funding was tied to a particular budget, election date or some planned running races in East London.
There is no specific LOCOG funding for cycling infrastructure associated with the games. There is a one-line commitment in the Olympic bid to sustainability and there is a 'hope' (and nothing more) that 20% of all visitors to the games will cycle or walk - which makes sense when you consider that people queued for two hours to get a bus away from the Sydney Olympics at the end of the day.
However - it took a bit of a stink to get cycle parking in the Olympic park
next to the velodrome (doh!) and TfL's group which includes reps from the LCC and Sustrans is wedded to the idea of cycle routes that will have very limited capacity.
There is, actually, a problem that hitherto people planning for cyclists have not really had to consider overmuch. Ten thousand cyclists take up a huge wodge of space when they're on the move. Consider the BHF London to Brighton, or the Freewheel. It is as plain as a pikestaff to all but cycling organisations that getting squillions of bikes to the Olympics is a Mile End Road job, not a dopey Sustrans path across a park job. Or it would be if the Mile End Road wasn't being reserved for Olympic bigwig limos.
As far as the Super-Highways thing is concerned we're all going to have to reserve judgement. The first one to be declared (the A24/A3) is already a cycling super-highway - Johnson can only screw it up. Putting some more red tarmac from Clapham North to Colliers Wood is the obvious answer, but, since they've not done it so far I'm not holding my breath.
The second, going up Cable Street is less hopeful. Cable Street ranks as one of the LCCs great LCN+ 'achievements' - the trouble is that hardly anybody uses it now that they've discovered that the A13 is quicker, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that running red tarmac from Tower Bridge along The Highway to the top end of the Rotherhithe tunnel (and through the tunnel!) would potentially give you something close to the success story that is the A200 (Tooley Street down to Greenwich). So the decision to use Cable Street looks like Johnson's 'car first' agenda is going to win the day. It's just a pity that the LCC is still supporting this crap, but if you're an organisation that judges itself by the size of the cycling budget then infrastructure is an absolute neccessity.
And there's the rub. Everybody's getting all jiggy about £100 million for cycling. £140 million has been spent on LCN+ and it's largely been money down the drain. And there's one senior LCC bod who looks in on this forum who agrees with me.
Is it true that, where motor traffic crosses the
SH??????
