The Croydon Cycle Forum is a meeting held by the council 3 times a year with representatives from all the active cycling organisations in the borough. It is an opportunity to meet with a small number of councillors (Cllrs Wright, Chatterjee for the council, opposition councillor Kathy Bee), council officers and other cycling groups to discuss matters relating to cycling in Croydon. The most recent meeting was held on Tuesday 6th November, and was my first opportunity to go along and see if I could make a difference. So I joined local cycling champions Austen Cooper (our co-ordinator) and Jim Bush as we attempted to make a difference for cyclists in Croydon.
The meeting kicked off with a presentation about the upcoming ‘Connected Croydon’ project. This project will be splashing out a whopping £50 million redesigning the urban space in several key segments of Croydon including East Croydon, Fairfields, Old Town and London Road. Shockingly cycling barely got a mention. At the conclusion of the presentation, Austen enquired of the presenter what the goal of the projects were in terms of increasing cycling numbers. He was told there was no goal to increase cycling numbers. This of course flies in the face of the Mayor’s target for a 400% increase in cycling in Croydon by 2026.
I spoke of the Times ‘Cities Fit For Cycling’ campaign and urged and the presenter to take a lead on ‘going Dutch’ to study Dutch design principles and apply them in the redesigns of the urban space, in line with the demands of Times’ campaign. I didn’t make any specific requests for changes to infrastructure, but was abruptly told that it takes time to get to where the Dutch are, and we aren’t far enough along yet, so we can’t apply Dutch design standards. A secure little paradox to prevent any change in favour of cycling then, we cannot design our cities with Dutch principles until we already have cities designed to Dutch principles.
The presenter of the £50 million project departed after our unsuccessful attempts to get even a commitment to looking into cycling issues as part of the work. A brief discussion of ‘bike week’ took place. I took the opportunity to bring up the prospect of ‘car free Sundays’, reminding the forum how successful these have been in cities around the world in reminding residents how pleasant their city can be without the constant roar of motorised traffic flowing through their streets. I was reliably informed that the council did not feel it had the resources to handle such an operation.
We had the discussion on one-ways and contraflow cycling facilities, the source of which I discussed in some detail in this blog post. The forum was of consensus that one-way systems should be avoided in general, contraflow cycle lanes or exceptions were essential where they were put in and plug-no entry methods (where motor traffic is forced to enter and leave the street at opposite ends, but the street remains in two way operation for all other purposes) were preferable to one-way systems where they were requested. I also pushed the council officers to consider closing off the street to through-traffic where possible with filtered permeability schemes. The ideas were taken on board but as the cycle forum has no power, having ideas “acknowledged” is the best that can be achieved.
I also took the opportunity to highlight the dangerous environment for cyclists created by the one-way system at Crystal Palace. By this point I had little hope of anything coming of it, and this was confirmed by the polite smiles that were the only response to my worries for the safety of cyclists on this road system. We brought to the forum’s attention our hopes to close the rat runs in Croydon, especially on roads designated as LCN routes, but were told there was just no money. We have to “work within the restrictions placed on us” said Councillor Wright.
Overall I was very pleased with our performance at the meeting, between Austen, Jim and myself we raised a lot of issues and brought to the forum’s attention many feasible and cheap solutions to improve the landscape for cycling. However, as I depart the meeting I have a nagging feeling that nothing material has been achieved. Have we given a brilliant performance and have nothing to show for it? That’s a reasonably accurate way of looking at it.
Between Councillors Wright and Chatterjee it doesn’t feel like we are talking to people who have any real impact on decision making at Croydon Council. What is the point of a cycle forum that isn’t attended by any of the key members of the traffic management cabinet committee? Where is Jason Perry, Phil Thomas, Mike Fisher, Jon Rouse? There is no formal system to feed back our ideas to these councillors. We are simply talking into the void. The cycle forum controls no budget, makes no decisions and is abhorrent to me. The very existence of a ‘cycle forum’ makes an outsider of the issue of cycling, something separate from normal traffic management and urban planning. In typical British fashion, designs are drawn up, decisions are made, and then cyclists are given a brief thought once all the material decisions are made. This is how we get shared-use pavements and ridiculous splashes of paint in unhelpful places.
As a campaigning group we would do well to remain guarded over the usefulness of the cycle forum. If we are not careful it simply becomes a distraction and if we focus on it, our campaigning efforts are being focused into the void. We have to go after the big players, the councillors who make the real decisions and we need to get one of them ‘on-board’. Without a single councillor on the council championing the cycling cause we will never see any funding and we will never see any change.
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