Via Real Cycling and the
Southwark Cyclists, the two routes suggested are as follows:
One will go through Southwark (A24 - A3 - Merton - Tooting - Kennington Park Road - Elephant and Castle improved bypass - Southwark Bridge Road - Southwark Bridge - City.
What precise shape the route will take through the Elephant’s notorious double-roundabout, given the stalled redevelopment works, is still to be decided.
The other pilot route is City - Cable Street - east out along the A13.
What’s noticeable
plotting these on another of my Google Maps lash-ups is that they’re straight, like Roman Roads. How very Boris. On a more pertinent note, what on earth’s the point of paralleling the DLR so closely out east, the soon-to-be-vastly-upgraded Northern Line down south and why is the City the only place people apparently want to get to? Out here in the west, where transport investment is just something that happens to other people, I’m wondering when he’ll get round to us so I’ve actually got something to ride my shiny new velocipede* on in my leisure hours. Finally, I do hope no one digs up this
map from a Pippa Crerar
article about Ken Livingstone’s suspiciously similar scheme from last February. Look, they’re marked in blue and everything, and one even goes to Ealing.
More information about the scheme is
coming to light elsewhere, with a Mayoral Answer being quoted referring to the ‘Docklands Cycle Highway’ or ‘Northern Line Cycle Highway’, which maps directly onto the two suggested by the Southwark Cyclists. More ominously:
To make best use of existing resources, cycle highways will concentrate on pragmatic and simple measures and will not depend heavily on engineering interventions.
This is the get-out clause - can’t be beastly to the motorist, so use existing cycle infrastructure such as the Cable Street scheme, change the colour, stick a few signs up and get Guto to tell everyone it’s a transport revolution. Doesn’t turn Balham into Beijing, though, does it?
In any case, there seems to be a strand of opinion (check it out on Google Streetmap, actually) that the A24/A3 corridor is already fairly well equipped:
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.
* Obviously my other half won’t be riding it to work - far too dangerous. Have you seen the traffic out there of a morning? Lethal.
http://www.boriswatch.co.uk/
