The borough is currently consulting on ambitious low-traffic neighbourhood proposals for Bow. It's really heartening to see such good plans being put forward, which prioritise walking, cycling, public transport and community above private car use. However there has already been some vocal opposition to the scheme, and it won’t go ahead unless supporters also make their voices clearly heard.

Please please please make sure you respond to the consultation by Wednesday 29 July. We suggest that you tick “very supportive” in relation to every proposal, and ask for all closure points to be 24/7 (much of the worst driving in Bow is in the evening). Then tell all your friends and family in the area to do likewise:

Click here to respond to the consultation

If you have time to ask for improvements to make the scheme even better, we suggest that you use the comments boxes to ask for the following:

• Scheme 2: two-way cycling to be permitted on Roman Rd East outside market operate hours;
• Scheme 3: contraflow cycling on the easternmost bit of Old Ford Rd and an additional bus gateway on either Parnell Rd or Jodrell Rd;
• Scheme 6: an additional bus gateway on Fairfield Rd; and
• more bike hangars throughout the scheme!

Email Bow’s councillors

Local councillors will be receiving plenty of emails from people who don’t want any restrictions on private car use. For this scheme to move forward, there also needs to be support, so please do go ahead and email them to tell them it’s great! In particular, it’s worth saying that the closure points need to operate 24/7: this is a key area where the scheme risks being watered down, but its benefits will be dramatically lessened if through traffic is allowed to stream through Bow every evening and weekend.

Please email your support to all five Bow councillors alongside borough-wide public realm leads Dan Tomlinson and Abdal Ullah. If you live or work in Bow make sure you mention it, but if not you can still email to say you’re a visitor and that these proposals will make you much more likely to visit the area’s shops, pubs and restaurants. The councillors’ email addresses are as follows (you should be able to copy and paste them as a block):

amina.ali@towerhamlets.gov.uk; Cllr.Rachel.Blake@towerhamlets.gov.uk; Cllr.marc.francis@towerhamlets.gov.uk; Cllr.Asmak.Begum@towerhamlets.gov.uk; Val.Whitehead@towerhamlets.gov.uk; Dan.Tomlinson@towerhamlets.gov.uk; Abdal.Ullah@towerhamlets.gov.uk;

Fears, myths and worries

You might have heard some folks saying this scheme or schemes like this will lead to Armageddon. You might believe some of the myths that have built up around “low traffic neighbourhoods”. Hopefully you don’t, but if you do or know anyone who does, there is a helpful myth-buster page on the Better Streets for Tower Hamlets website.

Plans for the Barkantine Liveable Streets scheme are currently out for consultation, closing on Wednesday 19th February.

After carrying out site visits and discussions amongst committee members the consensus was that the proposals are very good, with only a small number of extra asks to make in order to improve this already very good plan further.

We therefore suggest that you tick “very supportive” in relation to every proposal in the consultation (scroll right down to the bottom of the page to find the questionnaire) – and then get all your friends and family in the area to do the same.

Make the scheme even better

Although the scheme is very good, below are a couple of areas where it could be further improved. If you have the time, please use the free text boxes to ask for the following:

• Throughout: ask for many more cycle hangars to be installed ( we suggest at least one per street), and also that all existing and proposed one-way streets will permit contraflow cycling.
• Scheme 2: an additional speed hump to be included on Alpha Grove, somewhere between Havannah Street and Malabar Street to ensure slow speeds of motor vehicles on approach to the junction of Malabar Street/Alpha Grove where the proposed school street will be.

If you are interested in more details of the scheme, there is some discussion on Cyclescape, but the most important thing is that as many people as possible fill in the consultation with supportive responses. Please do share as widely as you can.

Our borough has recently published its draft transport strategy 2019-41. The good news is that it’s really positive and ambitious on cutting car use and boosting walking and cycling. But in order for it to get adopted without being watered down, it needs your support today. The survey closes on Sunday 15 September.

Basically, fill it in for your personal transport choices and info, and with...

Q10: please tick “yes” throughout to support all six of the draft strategy’s priorities.

Q11 and/or Q15, where there are spaces to put in extra text, consider putting any of the below in your own words, as well as your own ideas too!

• Focus on how the strategy will be delivered; all too often in Tower Hamlets, strategies are produced and schemes are planned and consulted upon, but then nothing happens!
• Ask for an end to public consultation as a referendum. The strategy should set the tone for schemes coming forward, with consultation used to tweak schemes, not decide if they happen or not.
• The Key Performance Indicators which are promised on the strategy’s final page should include ambitious measurable targets, including plenty of interim milestones (so that future mayors don’t feel they are off the hook because 2041 is a long way away).
• The economic benefits of walking and cycling do not get as much of a look-in in Priority 3 as they deserve.
• The strategy could make it clearer that walking and cycling are the most socially inclusive modes of transport.
• Canary Wharf represents a major barrier to cycling and walking: it’s difficult to access by bike or on foot, and it cuts off the Isle of Dogs from the rest of the borough. The strategy should explicitly commit to working with the Canary Wharf Estate to get them on board with improving the area for both cycling and walking.

There is a proposal currently out for consultation to improve road safety and reduce traffic around the Malmesbury Primary School and Central Foundation Girls' School in Bow. We strongly support these principles. However, the proposed scheme, which primarily consists of new one-way streets, is not good enough. It could easily be made a lot better by making the relevant streets no-through roads and part-time School Streets – a far more ambitious and effective approach. And we are particularly concerned that the new one-way streets do not include any proposal for contraflow cycling nor, in one case, any mitigation for the increased speeds which one-way operation can encourage.

Please do respond by Friday 29 June to ask the borough to do a lot better for these streets; you can either use the webform on the consultation website (scroll to the bottom) or email towerhamlets.consultation@projectcentre.co.uk with your thoughts. If you would like any inspiration, our consultation response is below.

The Tower Hamlets Wheelers consultation response:

We strongly support the principle of reducing through traffic and mitigating its negative impacts in residential streets across Tower Hamlets. We also agree that streets around schools should be particular priorities for this. However, we do not believe that the proposed scheme meets the desired objectives, and we cannot therefore support it. We have significant concerns and suggestions for major improvements as follows:

• The objective of reducing through traffic and unsafe driving in Harley Grove and Benworth St would be achieved much more effectively by simply closing Harley Grove to through motor traffic at its junction with Bow Rd. It is not clear to us why this option has been disregarded in favour of a more complex and less effective proposal of a one-way system and a banned right turn. We therefore urge the borough to seriously look again at this.
• The same rationale applies to Coborn St: closing it to through motor traffic at its junction with Bow Rd would be a much more effective way of reducing through traffic around Malmesbury Primary School. We are particularly concerned about the proposal to make Coborn St one-way without any footway build-outs or other measures to slow traffic speeds, as there is strong evidence that making roads one-way without such mitigation increases motor traffic speeds and danger, as people tend to drive faster when they are confident that they will not meet another vehicle approaching head-on.
• If there is a concern that these alternative proposals would lead pupils’ parents driving into Harley Grove and Coborn Street and undertaking dangerous U-turns or getting stuck amongst other parents’ vehicles, we suggest that these roads could both be made School Streets (i.e. they are closed to non-residents’ vehicles at school run times). School Streets are currently being implemented widely in Hackney and Camden, and have generally proved popular with parents and local residents. We also note that introducing School Streets in Tower Hamlets was a manifesto pledge of the current Labour borough administration.
• In addition to providing major benefits for residents and pupils at the two schools in the area, another great benefit of closing Harley Grove and Coborn Street to through motor traffic at their junctions with Bow Road would be to completely remove two side-road risks from users of Cycle Superhighway 2 (CS2) on Bow Road. We frequently receive feedback that drivers entering and exiting side roads without properly looking are a major source of discomfort and danger for people cycling along CS2, and it would represent a missed opportunity not to remove these risks as part of this scheme.
• We are very concerned that new one-way streets are being proposed without permitting contraflow cycling. This would damage the cycling permeability of the area, preventing convenient cycling access from CS2 to the residential properties, schools and other amenities on Harley Grove and Coborn St. In addition, it is in opposition to the principles of the borough’s cycling strategy (Tower Hamlets: a cycling borough), which aims to roll-out permitted contraflow cycling in many existing one-way streets in the borough, and in opposition to TfL’s London Cycling Design Standards, which state that one-way streets should always permit contraflow cycling unless there is a strong reason not to. If our alternative proposals are not progressed, it is in our view essential that contraflow cycling is permitted on Harley Grove, Benworth St and Coborn St.

Five Tower Hamlets mayoral candidates faced residents' questions for the first time this election season on Thursday, 5 April, appearing at the Cycling and Walking Hustings arranged by the borough's cycling campaign group Tower Hamlets Wheelers. The current Mayor, John Biggs (Labour), was joined in Limehouse Town Hall by Anwara Ali (Conservative), Elaine Bagshaw (Liberal Democrat), Ciaran Jebb (Green) and Rabina Khan (People's Alliance of Tower Hamlets). Ohid Ahmed (Aspire) was invited, but was unable to attend.

The organisers opened the event by explaining why it makes sense to deal with cycling and walking together: making London work well for cycling is increasingly being recognised by City Hall and Transport for London as naturally going hand-in-hand with making it good for walking too. This is reflected in the fact that the 32-borough London Cycling Campaign ask for the borough elections, called "My Liveable London", is being made jointly with its pedestrian equivalent Living Streets.

The candidates each made a short opening statement. Anwara Ali, a GP in the borough, spoke passionately about the public health benefits of increasing active travel. Elaine Bagshaw offered a personal perspective, talking about how her experiences as a relatively new cyclist in Tower Hamlets had opened her eyes to the need for greatly improved cycling infrastructure, as did John Biggs, who mentioned that one of his first acts upon election had been to give up the mayoral car in favour of walking to engagements across the borough. Ciaran Jebb said that Tower Hamlets - a borough where almost two-thirds of households do not have a car - was far too dominated by motor traffic. Finishing up the introductions, Rabina Khan expressed a strong desire to get many more people, especially teenagers, cycling in the borough.

Questions from the 50-strong audience included the extent to which candidates would be willing to push through schemes that would remove space from cars to provide infrastructure for cycling; how they would undertake to stop rat running; how they would improve conditions specifically for walking in the borough; how cycling and walking improvements would be funded; and how - in the light of recent attacks, including "bike jackings" - social safety on off-road walking and cycling routes could be improved.

Candidates' answers were generally well-informed and positive. A negative note did come in relation to privately-run dockless bike-sharing schemes, such as Ofo, where all five candidates expressed scepticism as to their value - although no candidate went as far as to rule out their arrival in Tower Hamlets over the coming four years.

One questioner asked if Victoria Park park could be kept open at night; its current closure at dusk is a long-running problem for cyclists, particularly on short winter days, given that there are no low-traffic or off-road alternative routes. Ciaran Jebb wanted to keep the park open, suggesting that the borough could implement an innovative solution such as solar-charged motion-activated lighting, but the other four candidates were non-committal, citing reservations about the cost and visual impact of installing lighting. There was, however, some support expressed for improvements to cycling provision on parallel roads.

Overall, all five candidates spoke very favourably about improving conditions for cycling and walking, to such an extent that perhaps the main complaint on social media and in the room was that too little distinguished them from one another!

#THHustings well this has all been very civilised but I'm not sure if voters are any clearer. All major candidates support principles and talk a good game, very few answers separated them and then not by much...

— Paul Brocklehurst (@paulbrock) April 5, 2018

There were, however, a handful of tangible differences in commitments and focus. Anwara Ali was alone in opposing the planned Canary Wharf to Rotherhithe walking and cycling bridge, citing value-for-money concerns, and John Biggs conspicuously did not quite go as far as to commit to asking TfL to complete Cycle Superhighway 2 past Whitechapel Market. And, in response to a question about how to stop inconsiderate cycling causing discomfort to pedestrians, Ciaran Jebb was notably the only candidate to make the well-received point that installing high-quality cycling infrastructure would not only reduce such conflict directly, but also indirectly, through greatly broadening the demographic of people who cycle (thus increasing the numbers of slow, casual cyclists).

The Wheelers had asked all candidates to sign up to their Tower Hamlets Cycling Manifesto, which comprises a set of 12 principles and three deliverables (five strategic new cycling routes, low-traffic neighbourhoods for half the borough, and a significant increase in secure bicycle parking for residents). Anwara Ali, Elaine Bagshaw, and Ciaran Jebb had signed up beforehand, and John Biggs and Rabina Khan signed up there and then: a clean sweep of the candidates who were present.

There was an overall feeling of candidates saying "yes, yes, yes" to get our votes. One good question from the audience tried to get candidates to say with limited funds what would they drop

— ManOnThe339 (@ManOnThe339) April 6, 2018

It was heartening that all five candidates seemed to genuinely understand many of the issues and appreciate the widespread benefits of improving conditions for cycling and walking in the borough. However it is, of course, just four weeks before an election, and candidates in full-on vote-winning mode are unlikely to be inclined to say "no" to anyone. Perhaps the toughest question came right at the end: how highly would walking and cycling rank among all the pressures that the Mayor would face and, if pushed by competing priorities, which of Cycling Manifesto asks would the candidates drop? The candidates all struggled to give a clear answer to this, with the consensus appearing to be that the asks were sufficiently reasonable it should not be necessary to drop any.

The three asks to which the candidates signed up do, however, go significantly further than the candidates' pre-existing commitments. To take the most easily quantifiable of the three, the Cycling Manifesto requires 300 on-street bike hangars to be installed by 2022 (which would, incidentally, still leave Tower Hamlets with slightly fewer bike hangars in 2022 than Hackney has today); this represents a major increase on John Biggs' and Rabina Khan's previously-stated commitments (100 and 120 hangars respectively). And the other two asks (low-traffic neighbourhoods for half the borough, and five strategic new cycling routes) would, if completed to a suitably high standard, be even greater undertakings for the incoming borough administration and - given the extent of the interventions involved - also be likely to attract a degree of controversy in some areas.

overall, all the parties done good at #thhustings. However as you've pointed out before, the proof comes when they have to champion specific schemes and are facing vocal opposition. Right now Tower Hamlets is relatively uncontroversial (on cycling at least!)

— Paul Brocklehurst (@paulbrock) April 6, 2018

The proof of the successful candidate's commitment will, of course, come with delivery. If one of the five candidates who has signed up to the Cycling Manifesto wins the election, we should be able to expect Tower Hamlets to be a significantly better place for cycling and walking in 2022 than it is today. The Wheelers will look forward to working with the incoming administration over the next four years to support the implementation of the promises which were made in Limehouse on Thursday.