Representatives from Tower Hamlets Wheelers and the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) today urged LB Tower Hamlets to publicly engage and lead on reducing the danger from lorries in the borough.

Meeting outside the Town Hall, a letter was handed to Councillor Shahid Ali, Cabinet Member for Environment and Jamie Blake, Director Public Realm asking for the council's support of the LCC's Safer Lorries, Safer Cycling pledge.

The letter highlighted that large lorries are involved in about half the cyclist fatalities in London and in the past two years, five out of the fourteen cyclist deaths involving large lorries happened in LB Tower Hamlets.

At the start of the Safer Lorries campaign, an initial assessment by the LCC of each London borough regarding their commitment to lorry safety gave Tower Hamlets the lowest ranking. With the delivery of today's letter, Wheelers and LCC have now opened a dialogue with the council to work towards improving this ranking and ultimately supporting this campaign's pledge.

Photo by Chas.

At the end of 2012, THW was consulted by LB Tower Hamlets on a scheme for the western end of Bethnal Green (between St Matthew's Row and Shacklewell Street). It involves the road being narrowed and cycle tracks built either side of the road in between the parking bays and pavement.

We responded objecting to the proposed plans for numerous reasons e.g. lack of reasoning for the need to take cyclists off the road for this short section, creating new dangers at the track entry and exit points, convoluted route of the cycle tracks (winding around trees...). Overall we consider it a waste of money.

At the beginning of March, THW reps met with LBTH officers on site at Bethnal Green Road to discuss our concerns further. The construction work though had already begun and we're left still being unclear why the council wants to build this facility and narrow the road.

The road narrowing part of the scheme is the same as was recently implemented at the western end of Roman Road. We weren't consulted on that work but again since using it are unclear of who it is meant to be benefiting.

Looking forward we welcome that we are being invited earlier on in the process for intended works at the eastern end of Bethnal Green Road. We will continue to hope we can influence the traffic planning so that schemes properly consider pedestrians and cyclists.

Transport for London has produced the final response to their consultation regarding their plans to redesign the Mile End Rd/Grove Rd/Burdett Rd junction. Despite London Cycling Campaign (CCC), THW and Queen Mary University (QMU) proposing simple changes to improve conditions for cyclists and pedestrians in addition to their proposal, they are going ahead with their original plans. Both Wheelers and QMU believe more could have been done and that the consultation process was flawed.

Over 15,000 people work and study at QMU Mile End campus, and many travel through the junction as cyclists and pedestrians. TfL’s held a consultation event at QMU, which was meant to run 11-2 but they left at 12.30, their reason being “not a single person had attended to speak to us about the scheme”. We know many people from QMU, and from outside, who went after 12.30. Having run this type of event before, TfL and their partners must know people are most likely to visit during their lunch break. This is not effective consultation.

After the Queen Mary U debacle, THW handed out TfL’s information to over 150 cyclists at the junction from 7.30-9.30 one morning and also posted info and links to well over 500 people on our email group, mailing list and Facebook page. We aren’t there to do TfL’s work for them but did so because we believe cyclists using the junction should have the opportunity to comment and would have relevant points to make about cycling and cyclists’ safety there.

TfL posted info to 3130 addresses in the area but the responses they received totalled 109. We wonder how many of these resulted from Wheelers’ efforts.

We appreciate TfL has to consider many viewpoints, not least managerial and political but Boris Johnson endorsed the Go Dutch principles. So, if TfL haven’t managed to work out the best way to implement them at this junction, a simple crossroads, how effective will their efforts be at the other junctions along CS2, and at Bow roundabout, not to mention across the rest of London? Are they really serving the needs of cyclists adequately.

LCC’s response to the consultation sums it up: ‘Mayor Boris Johnson pledged to make London’s streets “as safe and inviting for cycling as they are in Holland ” in response to LCC’s Love London, Go Dutch campaign. The pledge applies to Cycle Superhighway 2, which is an important route in this respect. We believe that the proposed changes provide some substantial improvements but fall short of the standard that could be achieved.’

Wheelers think some of the figures in TfL’s report may be incorrect,  that some of the comments and conclusions recorded in the report are wrong, and we also believe the consultation process to have been inadequate considering the junction’s importance, the danger it poses to vulnerable road users, and the scale of the planned works.

THW are considering our response to TfL’s report. If you have comments to make, please send them to this group by replying or to me, david@towerhamletswheelers.org.uk

Further reading - LCC's post Junction of Grove Road/Burdett Road and Mile End Road isn't going Dutch

The London Cycling Campaign has released a progress report on its Safer Lorries, Safer Cycling campaign and it's not good reading for those cycling in Tower Hamlets. Our council has been given the lowest possible mark for their inaction on committing to use the safest lorries and best-trained drivers.

The LCC's summary report is below together with links to the campaign pages and actions. Write to LBTH today to let them know that you think they should be leading on improving lorry safety on our borough's roads.

LCC Safer Lorries, Safer Cycling: Only two councils in London have committed to using the safest lorries and best-trained drivers, even though half of cyclist deaths in the capital involve lorries.

See the rating for all councils on our borough map

The shocking fact is that - while Islington and Waltham Forest councils have committed to the highest standards of lorry safety - a total of 10 councils have done almost nothing to protect cyclists from lorry danger:

Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Bexley, Croydon, Greenwich, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Richmond upon Thames, Tower Hamlets and Wandsworth.

We applaud Waltham Forest and Islington councils for committing to our Safer Lorries pledge, and hope your pressure can persuade many more councils to take our pledge too.

LCC chief executive Ashok Sinha said, "Our councils have a duty to only use the safest lorries and best-trained drivers.

"The inaction of the 10 worst councils stands in sharp contrast to the great work on lorry safety being done by the best councils and other major lorry transport users such as Transport for London."

• LCC has been in contact with all 33 councils in recent months, lobbying them to raise their standards of lorry safety.
• 2000 LCC supporters have already used our online letter-writing tool to write to their council leader calling on them to take our Safer Lorries pledge.
• 200 supporters have shared our letter-writing campaign with friends or on social media.

Yet despite this, 10 London boroughs are putting cyclist lives at risk daily by using inadequately equipped lorries and under-trained drivers.

Another 20 councils, despite taking some steps towards improving lorry safety, have failed to match the standards demanded by our Safer Lorries pledge.

Figures released from the 2011 census show that Tower Hamlets is the fourth highest local authority in the country in terms of proportion of households with no cars or vans. Top is the City of London, followed by Islington then Hackney then Tower Hamlets. The proportion of households without vehicles is about 63%, allowing for my maths. That means that car owners in Tower Hamlets are a minority of the population.

We need to further research the figure from the 2001 census but we think that this is an increase of 3%. Of course in Tower Hamlets this non-car owning population includes those who choose not to own a car as well as those who can't afford to.

As to the usually resident population the census estimate was 254,100 residents (March 2011). This is a 29.6% increase on the 2001 census results.

Thanks to our consultant demographic historian Humphrey Southall.