After Westminster Hall, where next?

I have been neglecting this blog, both pulled away by other projects and watching with awe the unfolding of The Times‘ Cities Fit For Cycling campaign. I will assume that all of the readers of this blog have managed to keep up with those events through other sources, and have signed up and lobbied their representatives.

On Thursday afternoon, of course, the Cities Fit For Cycling campaign reached Parliament, with an excellent turnout of MPs enthusiastic for cycling and an astonishing degree of cross-party agreement about the things that make cycling unsafe and unattractive, and the sort of solutions that should be pursued. Unlike Boris “keep your wits about you” Johnson, the assembled MPs recognised that fast and busy roads are the main barrier to people making journeys by bicycle, and they recognised that Britain’s roads are not a natural and immutable phenomenon but things that we can alter to make less dangerous and more attractive for cycling.

There is, of course, only so much that backbench MPs can do, and the picture of Dutch-style cycling in Britain that one-by-one the MPs painted has so far been ignored by those who actually have the power to make a difference.  It is up to ministers to turn the debate into action, and the minister Norman Baker’s response to it all was, of course, embarrassing. Early Day Motions and backbench debates don’t, by themselves, change anything, and as Robert Davis and Cycalogical both point out, we should not be naive and think that the mere fact that this one debate has occurred means that we have received any of the things that were asked for.

But nor should we be too cynical and pessimistic: exciting things are happening. For as long as I’ve been writing about transport, cycling campaigners have tried to tell me that there is no point in asking for high quality cycling infrastructure because there isn’t the political will for it: there aren’t the numbers or the demand. Well the events this past year, and these past few weeks especially — the growing and multiplying flashrides and protests, the rise of cycling as an important London election issue, the Times campaign, and now the remarkably large show of MPs who really get it — have suggested to me that there are the numbers and there is the demand for change. Yes, promises have been made and broken before. But we know much more now — not least, of the alternatives that are possible. Now is the time to learn from those past failures, but not to learn that failure is inevitable. We must make sure that the issue remains at the top of our MPs’ agendas, and we must now set out exactly what ministers need to do, so that they can not fob us off with insufficient funds spent on inadequate things. This could be our “Stop The Child Murder” moment, but only if our efforts are sustained and focussed.

Norman Baker and David Cameron have already claimed their support with many words and few actions. It is, of course, obvious when poor Norman Baker is fobbing us off with a few pennies, barely enough for tiny isolated local incremental improvements; or when our MPs are trying to pass the buck to under-resourced local authorities. It needs to be equally obvious what real activity would look like.

The Times have set out the things that they think should be done in their manifesto. It’s a nice try, and identifying specific tasks for government — so that we can see clearly when they are or are not getting on with it — is exactly what we need to be doing. But The Times‘s list is not quite right. Chester Cycling has set out a better set of objectives for infrastructure, alongside an excellent set of principles for guiding policy discussions and keeping us on track.

My own list of tasks for ministers would place infrastructure at the top — because it’s the biggest, most expensive, and highest impact task — and look something like this:

Norman Baker’s department must get to work revising or replacing the engineering manual for cycling infrastructure — one of the most important promoters of crap cycle facilities and an active impediment to the import of international best practice — and changing the way that highways departments think about building for the bicycle (with the help of The Times‘s suggested “cycling commissioners”, perhaps). The Times are correct to identify junctions as the top priority for rebuilding, but unless we change the engineering manuals and culture, the rebuilt junctions won’t look any different from before. I will go into this in great detail in forthcoming posts.

The Times are absolutely right that funding needs to be redirected to cycling — more, even, than they specify (and taken from out dated relief road schemes). But of course large sums should not be handed out just to be wasted on substandard stuff that will need fixing later. In the first year, while a better engineering manual is being prepared, spending should be focussed on ensuring that we have the right expertise — the sort of expertise that Cycling England was just beginning to build up when it was cut — and that local authorities are ready to spend the money on something that actually sounds sensible and worthwhile when it does become available. Meanwhile, since almost everything that the DfT does is dependent on the Treasury thinking it’s a good idea, I imagine it would be sensible for Baker, Greening and The Times to be specifically working on those who hold the purse strings — making the case for serious and sustained investment.

The Times are right that 20mph should be the default urban speed limit, cycle lanes or not. 20mph is increasingly the urban speed limit, and most authorities would like it to be far more widespread, but 20mph zones are held back by the expense and bureaucracy of implementing it street-by-street. Given that this government is a fan of all that “libertarian paternalism” stuff — the latest being to make workplace pensions opt-out rather than opt-in — they should make 20 the default urban limit. Authorities would then have to go to the expense of opting out, consulting and erecting signs on the few roads where the appropriate limit is 30mph, rather than on the very many where it is 20.

The Times rightly identify big trucks as a problem. They suggest some sensible enough technological solutions to the danger they pose — alarms, sensors, safety bars, and the like — but bizarrely suggest that they only need to be present on trucks “entering city centres”. Vehicle design standards are generally handled by the EU these days, and my guess is that the EP is probably the best place to pursue this. However, there are steps that this government should be taking: standing up to the haulage industry’s relentless demands for bigger and heavier trucks, and pushing those big trucks back out of the city centres and narrow streets that should never have been expected to accommodate them.

There is one thing conspicuously absent from The Times‘s manifesto, given their focus on road danger and the many tragic stories that have been raised both in the newspaper and repeatedly by MPs who had lost constituents. They say nothing about getting dangerous drivers off the road. It is abundantly clear that in recent years we have developed a massive problem with the investigation of dangerous driving. Between us we could compile vast lists of hit and run incidents and near death experiences that have all ended in the police giving up because of lost files, untraceable number plates and the vehicle owner claiming not to have been the driver. Meanwhile, when cases of dangerous driving do make it to court, the sanctions are woefully inadequate. If the government were serious about tackling road danger, ministers from the DfT, Home Office and Justice department would be working on reforms to the policing and sentencing of dangerous driving.

Those are the areas where I think we should be expecting to see action from ministers, and I’ll go into more detail about each in later posts. The other items in The Times’s manifesto? Can’t argue with gathering more reliable stats on cycling: the “audits” that we’ve had in the past have usually been far from robust. Little to say about training: the funding for it is already adequate and protected, as ministers like to regularly re-announce (though I’m not sure why, given that vehicular cycling training has only been developed as a way to cope with their failed roads policies). And sponsored cycleways? A policy championed by Boris Johnson is the last thing cycling needs.

Crap cycleways are the Franklinists’ legacy

Over at Transport Retort, clayliesstill covers the case of a death on a badly designed cycle track in Montreal, and extrapolates to a lesson on British cycle campaign strategy:

Advocates of quality facilities must acknowledge that a poorly designed cycle path can be more objectively dangerous, even if it is, in the long-term, beneficial because it increases the number of people using the route.

Isn’t that an odd thing to say? Like telling advocates of evidence-based medicine that they must acknowledge that pseudoscience can kill. Or like telling Nick Davies that advocates of good quality investigative journalism must acknowledge that tabloid rags can be harmful. The implication being that if you ask for one, you’ll probably get the other instead, so it would be better just to shut up about the whole thing.

Meanwhile, on a different subject, David says:

Yes, we all know about those “white line on pavement” cycle facilities, or, worse still, no white line on pavement “shared facilities”, but those are not what the campaign for proper cycle facilities is about. They are completely irrelevant. Nobody is asking for those, and talking about them is a diversionary tactic. The trouble is, in asking for nothing in terms of infrastructure, CTC actually contributes to the vacuum that allows these to come into being.

Hacks and quacks step in when there is a demand that can not be met by good journalism or good medicine, and when there are insufficient defences against the frauds. There is a great demand for a cycling environment which does not require mixing with large volumes of fast moving motor vehicles, and authorities are told in documents like The Way Ahead For Towns and Cities that they should be meeting that demand. To meet that demand, towns and cities have built crap cycleways, because the defences haven’t been there: the design standards are inadequate and there was little pressure to toughen them up; councillors and council officers don’t know how to do infrastructure properly, or lack the will to do it properly; and the few cyclists who were still left to join cycling organisations have been too busy talking amongst themselves about “effective cycling” and “right to the road” to hold anybody to account, leaving the few who recognised the need to get infrastructure right powerless.

Britain has not just been lacking an organised campaign for good cycling infrastructure, it has been lacking an organised campaign against bad cycling infrastructure. The mission of the new generation organisations like the Cycling Embassy is not merely to build up the will to construct infrastructure, but to develop the standards and the legislation that would ensure that only good infrastructure gets built — and that the crap cycleways, the legacy of the old era, get replaced.

For three decades cycle campaigning has been dominated by the vehicular cycling dogma epitomised by John Franklin, while calls for good infrastructure have been suppressed and sabotaged. It was under the anti-infrastructuralists’ watch that the crap got built. Anti-infrastructuralists must acknowledge that their strategy has failed to get people cycling, failed to defend the right to the road, and failed to prevent crap cycle lanes being built.

Tipping points

Since the 1950s, bicycle use has declined.  The one overwhelming reason is that decades of road construction, widening, and “improvement”, coupled with the advances in car technology that put machines designed for the autobahn on British city streets and country lanes, have given us a network of hostile and frightening barriers to cycling.  Cities and countries which today have mass cycling — Copenhagen and the Netherlands being the leading examples — did not escape the rise of the motor car.  In the 1970s, they too were discovering the many negative consequences of mass car use, and they too were seeing the rapid abandonment of cycling as transport in response to hostile road conditions.  But they have since halted and are reversing that decline.

We know exactly why cycling declined.  We know the precise interventions that successfully reversed the decline of cycling.  How to design streets and infrastructure that removes barriers to cycling is a solved problem, and “segregation versus integration” is a controversy that is visibly approaching a consensus in this country right now.  We know what needs to be done, the issue now is how to drum up the political will to do it, and to do it properly.

David Hembrow explains how the Dutch did it: the snappily named “Stop the Child Murder” campaign of the 1970s focussed on the massive rise in deaths and injuries of children on the roads, and demanded that children be able to safely cycle to school.

Mikael at Copenhagenize explains how the Danes did it: mass demonstrations in the 1970s and 80s, and quirky action to highlight the number of cyclists being killed on the roads.

And, I notice, the Germans are doing it right now, citing now in addition environmental and energy concerns:

The way that we do it won’t be exactly the same as the Dutch, Danes, or Germans.  Our situations, politics and cultures are not the same — though nor are they so different.  What is certain is that even here, big things are beginning.

Haven’t you seen them?  You’ll see them.

Cycling’s bogeyman

There was a bit of a monkey fight over the nascent Cycling Embassy of Great Britain recently thanks to an article by Carlton Reid on Road.cc (since rebutted by Jim).  Given that the organisation in question has only had a preliminary meeting and has not even launched yet, I don’t think it’s worth responding to any of the speculation and fantasies that have been flying around.  But the episode revealed something fascinating about the way the minds of veteran British cycling campaigners work.

They are all constantly in a state of abject fear that cycling is just about to be banned.

I found it very difficult following all of the comment threads on and about the Road.cc articles.  Cycling Embassy supporters kept being accused of wanting cyclists to be banned from the roads, but I could never trace the accusation back to anything relevant that the accused people had actually said.  And then I stumbled upon a fabulous forum thread that started with a very simple two sentence post, and it all fell into place:

‘Cycling Embassy of Great Britain’ have it VERY wrong
IMO. Their way will lead to cyclists being banned from Britain’s roads.

The Embassy folk and other onlookers were as baffled as I when it came to the origin of this “ban” theme in the comments.  But I now realise that many of our venerable vehicular cycling campaigners are thinking about cycling bans every second of the day.  Everything they see and do, the first question they ask themselves is: will this lead to cycling being banned in any way?  They can’t get out of bed in the morning without first contemplating what effect such an action might have on the likelihood of a cycling ban.

It’s difficult to blame them: you really do get the occasional powerful nutter who genuinely does do something to try to get cycling banned (and when it does happen, every cyclist I know, whatever their colours, will be there fighting them and mocking them).  The most widely known story in British cycling campaigning is the legend of Daniel Cadden, convicted of inconsiderate cycling because he rode on a Telford (horrible 1960s new town designed entirely around a network of fast driving routes) B-road, when he should, so the citation goes, have been riding on the inadequate (and, being British, presumably badly maintained) cycle path, that ran alongside.  By reaching a conviction, that case demonstrated an alarming combination of powerful people who agreed to ban cycling: the policeman, the CPS case handlers, and the judge.  Another example currently going around the cycling campaigns and forums is the man whose response to his son, while cycling on a Uttoxeter dual carriageway, having been killed by a texting trucker, is to call for cycling to be banned from the road.

But, with the help of the CTC’s legal fund, Daniel Cadden’s case was easily overturned in an appeal heard by a sensible judge, and even the Daily Mail called the original conviction bonkers and laughed at the judge in the case.  While there genuinely are a few people out there with the motivation and maybe even the power to get cycling banned, there is a massive force of cyclists that can easily be manoeuvred against them.

So vigilance against these occasional loonies is important.  The problem is that many of our more hardened cycling campaigners seem to be in a state far beyond vigilance: they are absolutely paralysed with fear, too afraid to do anything at all that might fix any of the massive problems faced by cyclists and would-be cyclists just in-case doing so might somehow trigger cycling to be banned in some way.  There are cycling forums out there that seem to be nothing more than an echo chamber for Chinese whisper re-tellings of the legend of Daniel Cadden.  And it all leads to the most spectacular absurdities, such as that anybody who thinks cyclists deserve proper infrastructure must be working for the car lobby.

Vigilant cycling campaigners are important.  The paranoid ones are safe to ignore.  If in conversation one raises at random the spectre of a cycling ban, you’re probably talking to the latter.

Pie in the Skyride

Boris Johnson is “doing an awful lot to try to encourage cycling“. He’s doing Skyrides. Did he mention that he’s doing Skyrides? He is, you know. He’s doing Skyrides.

Actually, I usually only find out that he’s doing Skyrides on the day they happen — in the evening, after they’ve happened. Usually when Boris is telling us what jolly good fun everyone has had, and how everybody is now going to cycle everywhere. Or when Freewheeler is making fun of them. The point I’m getting at is that, while the Skyrides may be well advertised, they are not any better advertised than most big events in London. The high turnout at Skyrides can not be explained by fantastic advertising alone: the advertising merely alerts people to the existence of an event for which there is already vast but stifled demand. A day of conspicuously safe, quiet, unintimidating and unpolluted car-free streets almost advertises itself.

On a Skyride, people who would like to be able to cycle without having to interact with double-decker buses and men with ven get to do so. When they go home afterwards and the road-blocks are rolled back, do they feel in any way different about cycling among the chaotic metal missiles? Previous reviews of the evidence suggested that most merely remain unconvinced, no more or less likely to make journeys by bicycle. But one new piece of anecdotal evidence mentioned in an aside at the Embassy meeting (sorry, I noted the idea but now don’t remember who said it) suggests that some would-be everyday bicycle users do think differently after a Skyride than they did before.

Before the Skyride, people would like the opportunity to cycle — they want an easier, quicker, more fun way to make mundane everyday journeys; they’re worried about the amount of the family budget being gobbled by the car or the season tickets; and they want the family to be able to get some relaxing gentle exercise in the fresh air together. Their ears have pricked up at all the talk of The Mayor’s Cycling Revolution™, and they’re thinking of signing up, but aren’t completely decided yet. They hear about a Skyride and want to give it a go — it’s the excuse they’ve been looking for to dust off the bikes and remember how it’s done. And they go out and play in this car-free utopia, and see just how great things could be. And at the same time, they’re shown exactly how that compares to the real world — while being bombarded with helpful messages about how to survive vehicular cycling.

Skyrides don’t merely fail to encourage everyday cycling. By temporarily taking away the cause of the problems with our streets, they highlight just how bad the problems are. The would-be cyclist, on the edge of joining The Mayor’s Cycling Revolution™, can never go back to cycling with the traffic — not after they have seen and experienced Utopia. Just as your fancy gadget ceases to be fun the moment you see the amazing specs on the latest model, riding a bike ceases to be easy and fun when you’ve seen how much better it can be. The air ceases to be fresh and the exercise ceases to be gentle and relaxing. (Some people go as far as emigrating as they seek again that found but lost utopia.)

Skyriders may yearn to see that lost utopia again; yearn for it to exist always. But until it does, they will never be recorded as “cyclists”, never be part of a revolution, never be considered by the politicians, planners, and tabloid hacks who don’t even acknowledge their existence. Until that Utopia is built, what else can normal people do but silently dream of bicycles?

I think the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain wants to be the answer to that question.  I think they can be.

Are we winning?

I’ve just been scrolling through Google Reader clearing a couple of months worth of posts with videos that got saved-for-later when using a mobile connection.  Peter at Pedestrian Liberation asks whether we are winning, citing London Bridge as evidence that maybe we are.

I shot a similar video — above — of London Bridge a year ago almost to the day.  Peter wouldn’t have been able to make same film as me because the night after I shot it, TfL cut down the pedestrian cages (my improvised tripod) on the bridge, to improve the conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.  In the year old film, you see the bridge at a little after 8am — the peak time — on monday 4th january.  I’m not very good at estimating crowds, especially fast moving ones where you can’t see everybody, but there were surely 300-400 people per minute walking over the bridge, plus a couple of dozen cyclists (on a morning so cold that the docks were frozen inches thick) and several stuffed buses.  And what you can’t see in the film is the stuffed tube line beneath, the trains rattling over the neighbouring Cannon Street railway bridge, or the bicycles on the neighbouring and less bicycle-unfriendly Southwark Bridge.  (But nor can you see all the cars on the neighbouring CCharge-less Tower Bridge.)

There are only a handful more private motor vehicles than there are bicycles in the video, with taxis making up nearly half of them, and motorcycles and delivery and tradesman vehicles accounting for most of the rest.  Of the few remaining cars, a lot are probably actually minicabs.  It’s entirely plausible that they were all minicabs.

Yes, this is normal for London Bridge, and has been since at least the introduction of the CCharge in 2003.  London, of course, is not normal, but nor is it a world entirely different to the rest of the country.  As in London, all through the UK you’ll find that most people want an alternative to the blight of the car — to their spoiled streets and miserable hours wasted in jams.  They recognise that they are both a victim and an unwilling perpetrator of this car sick situation, but they don’t think they’ve been given a viable alternative.

On London Bridge they do have alternatives: development is an appropriate density for walking and cycling (at least from the railway terminus to the office); there’s a rail and tube line; and the cheap 24hr buses are too frequent to timetable.  Provide alternatives like these and they get used.  And that’s despite the many limitations that Londoners can happily whine about while not knowing how lucky they are: just imagine how much they would get used if one lane each way were a proper cycle path, and if London Bridge and Cannon Street stations were served by British Rail instead of Southern and SouthEastern, and if the Northern Line had better capacity and better reliability and better stations, and if the City’s streets were more pleasant places to walk around…

This is the most worrying thing about the latest policies of Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond — not so much that we are losing bits of the congestion charge, and other sticks with which to beat the motorist; for motorists already beat each-other more than enough to put normal people off driving — but that the alternatives are under threat.  The media remembers Ken Livingstone for the CCharge, but at least as important was the massive improvement to bus services (then priced at 65p a journey) that he introduced on the same day; Boris is cutting the Western Extension Zone, but more importantly, he is funding this with another bus fares hike, so that a journey is now twice the 2003 price.

Very few people are the kind of capital ‘M’ Motorists, who are never pedestrians; and the majority of people who drive say they would like to drive much less or not-at-all.  But that has been true for a long time, and that alone has not yet got us much closer to “winning”.  Partly this is because we have allowed the tabloids to get away with claiming that most Britons are big-M Motorists, and allowed them to dictate which policies the Motorist will stand for.  Part of turning things around is to get more people to declare: not in my name.  Some ideas for doing that another time.

Being realistic

So I mentioned that Carlton Reid and I both like the idea of mass bicycle use, and that we agree that high volumes of fast moving motor vehicles are a barrier to it.  But while I have drawn the conclusion that high-quality conspicuously safe dedicated cycling infrastructure is a pressing requirement if we are to make any progress, Reid’s experience tells him that this is an unachievable dream; a political dead end:

In such a car-centric society as the UK it is politically naive to demand to take meaningful space away from cars. Millions of vote-toting motorists would scupper any such plans.

The UK is in a different situation to Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, Carlton reminds us.  We have Motorists, and they just won’t stand for any loss of road space.

Instead of hard engineering, Reid proposes that there are other ways to overcome the traffic-barrier that stands in the way of mass bicycle use: soft behavioural and legal approaches.  We should continue to educate drivers to play nicely, and keep up the campaign for strict liability, proper enforcement, and meaningful punishments.

Because that has been working great so far.

I mean, those campaigns are great and important and I’m totally on board.  Those changes, if possible, would totally be an improvement.  But if campaigning for good infrastructure is considered a naive waste of our time, how stupid are we going to look asking for strict liability?  How long have drink-driving and mobile-phone use been illegal, and how long have governments been telling drivers of the dangers not to do those things?  Look how fast those campaigns have progressed.

The fabulously batshit “Grumpy”, member of the Association of British Nutters, tells us (after some entertainingly paranoid Mailesque diversions through xenophobia and homophobia) what the man in the Cul-de-sac thinks of strict liability:

They’ll be leaping out of lay-bys, dodging in and out of traffic, invading the motorways, going the wrong way round the M25 – the world’s their oyster, because they’ll be able to do no wrong. I wouldn’t put it past one or two of them to accidentally-on-purpose ride under a lorry just in order to claim the compensation.

I agree with Reid that we will never get Philip Hammond to say “yes” to any of our proposals.  But there’s a crucial difference between the law of the land and the priorities of planners: planning is not all in the hands of the man in Whitehall.  Many of the people we need to influence are local, and many of them already consult cycling organisations on projects (often to be told that all cyclists like to ride like they’re on a motorbike).  Bad luck if you live in the Tory provinces, but we have a mayor, an assembly, a regional transport department, an ongoing bicycle infrastructure project to argue about, and an election campaign to look forward to.  And our electorate don’t have the same transport priorities as the rest of the nation.

–Joe

Surrogates and segregation

You’ll have noticed that here at At War With The Motorist we like the idea of good segregated cycling infrastructure in places where bicycle users would otherwise have to interact with high volumes of fast moving and badly driven motor vehicles.  The point of developing the infrastructure is to develop mass bicycle use: having seen what has happened here and around the world, we’re satisfied that segregated paths are an important requirement for mass bicycle use; their absence a major barrier to it.

But mass bicycle use is not our ultimate goal either.  It’s just one way to help to achieve what At War With The Motorist really wants: places that are nice to live and work in.  Happy, healthy, stress-free cities and villages.  We want to remove the air pollution and noise pollution, the neighbourhood and community division and destruction, and the danger and intimidation from our streets: all problems that are caused or at least exacerbated by excessive use of motor vehicles (along with climate change, inequality of opportunity, war, and many other problems to explore one day in other posts).

And yet mass bicycle use is still not exactly the solution to our problems.  Because as we’ve seen again and again, create spare road capacity in London — by building a new road, displacing cars with a congestion charge, ripping out pedestrian crossings, or having a modal shift to trains and bicycles — and there will be ten others waiting to jump in that space.  Demand for road space in a city like London is so elastic that it will always be filled just to the edge of gridlock, whatever happens.

On segregated infrastructure, Carlton Reid says:

In such a car-centric society as the UK it is politically naive to demand to take meaningful space away from cars. Millions of vote-toting motorists would scupper any such plans. We have to build alliances with other active travel and true road safety organisations, not be single issue campaigners. And we probably have to recognise we’re not going to succeed with the present administration.

Mass bicycle use, if it were ever to be achieved without any changes to the roads, would likely make little improvement to the quality of our environs.  They would still be smelly, smoggy, noisy, nasty stressful places.  I would hesitate to call that a success.

So absolutely we should not get carried away and campaign on the single issue of segregated cycle paths, a mere surrogate endpoint.  Taking meaningful space away from cars is exactly what we ultimately need to be aiming for.  Not just building a bike path, but reducing the motor-vehicle capacity on the route of that path; making residential neighbourhoods impenetrable for through motor traffic while at the same time more friendly to people; getting motor-vehicles out of the narrow city centre side-streets that they’re destroying; and reforming the way we design new neighbourhoods, to prevent ourselves making the same old car-centric mistakes.

I don’t think those things are impossible.  Indeed, I see a lot of them already quietly happening.  Most car users are not political Motorists: they want nice livable streets too.  They’ve let pedestrian zones and residential road blocks and people-friendly developments happen, and I’ve seen no evidence that they wouldn’t also let bike paths happen.  It is not car users who have being vetoing the development of good bike paths.

What is a Motorist?

Last month I seemed to simultaneously hit a mark and touch a nerve with I don’t pay road tax.  Nik raised some dissent:

I do have a bit of an issue with your post painting all motorists as fat, lazy, inconsiderate, unable to change, destroying the environment, and so on. I do have a car, which I use to travel longer distances, particularly to countryside areas that don’t have train services, or whose train services are so inconvenient that using them is impractical. And I do even, occasionally, drive in London. [...] I don’t like the ‘at war with motorists’ tone, which is neither constructive nor reasonable, and risks dogmatically painting all motorists with the same brush, and also ignores the fact that outside of densly populated areas such as London, public transport is often patchy to non-existent, and people often have no choice but to drive.

The issue here is the Nik seems be identifying himself as a Motorist.  He seems to have fallen for the line of the tabloid and Top Gear media: that there are Motorists, and there are a few lonely losers and hippies who are either too poor or too misguided to drive.  In fact, just as there are several different kinds of bike user, Jillian Anable’s 2005 paper, ‘Complacent Car Addicts’ or ‘Aspiring Environmentalists’? Identifying travel behaviour segments using attitude theory (PDF link), identified six distinct attitudes to the car amongst day-trip travelers questioned at two National Trust properties near Manchester.

Motorists — the active advocates and pillars of Motorism — amounted to less than half of the car owners and drivers.  Motorists themselves can in turn be divided into two categories.  The Die Hard Drivers “are fond of cars and car travel, believe in the right to drive cheaply and freely and have negative feelings towards all other travel modes.”  Meanwhile, the Complacent Car Addicts “admit that the use of alternative modes is possible, but do not feel any moral imperative or other incentive to alter their car use.”  That is, there are lazy and selfish Motorists, and then there are actively evil Motorists.  No blog post is ever going to change their minds about using a car.

The section that Anable unfortunately chose to call Malcontented Motorists, are in fact not Motorists — not advocates of Motorism — at all.  Drivers in this section ” perceive a high number of constraints to the use of public transport despite feeling increasingly frustrated and unhappy with car travel and believing that they have a moral responsibility to change behaviour.”  They sound very much like the people for whom “public transport is often patchy to non-existent, and have no choice but to drive.”  These people don’t need a blog post to change their minds: they need a bus or bike path that goes where they need to go, or a better planned town that still has local jobs and shops.  (They might appreciate a blog post that helps them achieve that, though.)

The final section of Drivers are the Aspiring Environmentalists, who “have already substantially reduced their car use largely for environmental and health reasons but appreciate the practical advantages of car travel and are thus reluctant to give up ownership entirely.”  I am guessing that Nik is in this category.

Here are the numbers, also including the remaining categories — those who don’t drive out of choice (5) or necessity (6) (remember though: while the 6 categories probably apply throughout the population, albeit with blurred boundaries, the proportions given here are specific to the sort of people who decide to visit National Trust-owned historic buildings and gardens near Manchester on a certain day half a decade ago):

1. Die Hard Drivers, 19%
2. Complacent Car Addicts, 26%
3. Malcontented Motorists, 30%
4. Aspiring Environmentalists, 18%
5. Car-less Crusaders, 4%
6. Reluctant Riders, 3%

Acknowledging the varied attitudes of people who drive, the relative frequencies of those opinions, and the receptivity of those people to change their opinions and behaviours, is important for understanding things like the demand for speed cameras and segregated infrastructure (and the likely scale of opposition to these things), and the best way to pitch transport and town planning campaigns.  More on those issues in later posts.

As for whether declaring a “war on the Motorist” is helpful or constructive: our “about” page explains where the phrase came from, and our tongue-in-cheek adoption of it.  If a reader actually believes the tabloid reports of the “war”, I don’t think there’s much we could ever do to help them. Motorists are not our audience, and were never intended to be.  But we welcome all you other car users as allies, fellow victims of bad planning and policy, intelligent enough to recognise the absurdity of the idea that there has been a “war on the motorist”.

–Joe