Tag: westminster

On his Quietways, the boroughs are taking Sadiq Khan for a ride

The Mayor is giving boroughs money to build Quietways for cycling and the boroughs are misappropriating it. Exactly as history told us they would.

My commute these days takes in a section of the Mayor’s new “Quietway 3” as I go an extra mile trying to avoid as much as possible riding on the roads of the City of Westminster, one of London’s 33 local government boroughs.

Although TfL has been advertising Quietway 3 as “complete” for some time, it’s only in the past few weeks that barriers have come down to reveal the first physical hints of its existence.

Filter bubble

At Boundary Road, on the Westminster/Camden border, the Quietway crosses the busy Finchley Road, the main arterial road to the M1. The Quietway here benefits from a mode filter which prevents through motor traffic on Boundary Road from crossing the Finchley Road.

A filter has existed here for many years already, built as part of a route in the failed London Cycle Network. But for the Quietway, it has been expensively rebuilt with a very slightly different alignment, and with a replacement set of traffic signals that include low-level cycle signals.* The only thing that is really new here, and which is highlighted as one of the big boons for cycling, is an additional banned turn to further filter motor traffic from Boundary Road.

Less prominently highlighted is the other big benefit of this banned turn, which reveals the real reason for the existence of this mode filter. The new banned left turn means that traffic on Finchley Road doesn’t need to be stopped for pedestrians to get a green man signal across Boundary Road. Like the LCN-era mode filter before it, this scheme has been designed to smooth and expedite traffic flow on a major arterial road by removing potential junction conflicts and minimising its red signal time. It is a motoring scheme dressed up as a cycling scheme in order to use up a cycling budget.

Signal failure

Elsewhere the evidence of Quietway 3 is even less forthcoming, but we can see from the consultations what is planned.

After Boundary Road, the Quietway heads into Westminster borough on Ordnance Hill. At times when the parallel Finchley and Avenue Roads are busy and congested, Ordnance Hill becomes the motorist’s ratrun of choice for racing to Swiss Cottage, and it’s crossed by a series of other popular ratruns. So what are Westminster proposing to do to transform this busy motoring racetrack into a Quietway that can deliver on the mayor’s vision for cycling?

They’re putting pedestrian crossing lights on signalised crossroads and replacing some footway paving with fancy stone. That will be the junction between Ordnance Hill and Acacia Road, two unclassified residential streets, both paralleled on each side by major through roads, but which have somehow become so busy with motorists cutting through that they need signals to manage the traffic and help people cross.

acacia

But it’s definitely a cycling scheme Westminster are spending the cycling money on, because alongside the expensive traffic signals and fancy stone paving, they’re going to paint advanced stop lines for cyclists.

Needless to say from schemes like these, Quietway 3 is going to be crap. Quietway 3 is not going to do the slightest to transform these streets into somewhere that, to quote the objectives of the scheme, people who are less confident in traffic will want to cycle. That these streets need signals and advanced stop lines to manage the traffic is shouting that they are a failure even before the letter ‘Q’ has been painted all over them. They are not, and will not be, the “quiet roads” that the mayor claims.

But that’s not what’s infuriating. Westminster misappropriating cycling funds is what Westminster does. It’s barely worth a sigh of resignation. What’s infuriating is that their behaviour could be seen a mile off, but the mayor has chosen to ignore every warning.

Reinventing the wheel

The rhetoric behind the Quietways is that this is some kind of innovation the likes of which we’ve never seen before, a radical programme that will deliver the transformation needed to make the mayor’s vision for cycling a reality. We’re told to wait and see how well it works rather than make premature judgements on twitter.

But we can see from Quietway 3 that there isn’t the slightest innovation between this and the the early 2000s London Cycling Network that failed before it — and which it largely follows. We know how well it will work because we have tried this countless times before. We know it doesn’t work, we know exactly why it doesn’t work, and we know what needs to be done differently to make it work.

The Quietways are failing for the same reason the London Cycling Network failed, and why the National Cycling Strategy before that failed, and why most of the Local Sustainable Transport Fund failed, and almost every one of the dozens of cycling policies since the 1970s that have proclaimed the same vision as this one have failed. They are being delivered piecemeal by nearly 3 dozen different local authorities and agencies few of which have the resources, expertise or adequate guidance to deliver it, few of which entirely share the mayor’s stated vision for them, and several of which are actively hostile to the objectives of the schemes they’ve been asked to deliver.

Boroughs and local authorities are well practised in redirecting ringfenced funds to their own priorities, as Paul M says of the LCN:

When we analysed how the City of London had spent its LCN grant money from TfL over the last few years, we found that typically the budget disappears down three roughly equal sized holes. One is the physical, tangible (for what it is worth) expenditure on paint and asphalt and — very occasionally –kerbstones. The second is spent on feasibility studies, impact assessments, traffic counts, yada yada yada, maybe even the occasional engineering design, carried out by consultants. The third, startlingly, is in effect a subsidy of the City’s own planing and highways departments’ salary bills.

This is the lesson that was learned from the 1996 National Cycling Strategy in an extensive report in 2005. It’s what led to the short-lived Cycling England, set up because the DfT discovered once again that trying to implement the National Cycling Strategy through grants to local authorities, who had their own agendas, didn’t work:

Weaknesses of the existing arrangements: Local authorities as delivery bodies
The first is how to work with local authorities, at present the main delivery agents, to deliver. Our main performance management system for local transport – the Local Transport Plan (LTP) system – identifies cycling as one of a large number of “products” that central government is purchasing from local government in return for the capital investment. But, in practice, our work with local authorities reveals that cycling, in most cases, is a significantly lower priority for transport investment than other outcomes, such as better public transport or small-scale highway improvements. Despite the transformation in the availability of local transport capital since 1997 and the increased investment in cycling under the LTP regime, levels of expenditure on cycling still lag well below those in successful cycling cities outside the UK. Central government cannot insist that local authorities adopt a particular cycling programme, nor would it want to, given that the direction of local government policy is to increase the autonomy of local government; however it can influence authorities through the LTP process.

This suggests that, if cycling is genuinely a national priority, more diverse delivery mechanisms need to be introduced, to complement and increase the impact of what local authorities are doing.

Cycling England was created to stop our wasting money on an inefficient and ineffective way of delivering cycling projects through grants to local authorities. (It was abolished to save money, by, er, going back to that inefficient and ineffective system.)

None of this is news. We know very well what doesn’t work in delivering mass cycling, and the mayor has been warned again and again. But Sadiq Khan seems thoroughly determined to learn this lesson the hard way.

*This section has actually been a TfL scheme, so one department of TfL is happy to rip another just as much as the boroughs are.

city corridor

Langham Place / Regents Street from the roof of Broadcasting House. I’m surprised they allowed the nice curving footway outside All Souls Church to stick out so far — you’d have thought TfL and Westminster Council would have spotted the opportunity for stuffing in an extra traffic lane by cutting a few feet from the footway…

The Friday photo column is just an excuse to plug my photography stuff. Don’t you think they’d make good Christmas presents?

Westminster and TfL: quietly making things worse

Traffic wasn’t going anywhere fast around Picadilly Circus tuesday lunchtime. It was backed all the way from the bottom of the still one-way Haymarket up onto Picadilly Circus and beyond:

Trying to turn onto the newly two-way Pall Mall:

And up the still one-way Lower Regent Street:

It’s presumably because we’re at a half-way stage, where Pall Mall has gone two-way, Haymarket and Regent Street remain one-way, and Picadilly is half-closed and half-way transformed:

All of these works are, of course, a massive wasted opportunity. But they can’t make things any worse than they were, can they? They could, if the announced removal of traffic lights makes crossing the road more difficult for pedestrians. But the new cage-less central reservation is supposed to make it easy for pedestrians to cross wherever they like through gaps in the traffic. We’ll see about that.

But Westminster have quietly made things worse in another way. I’ve not seen any blogs mention it, and can find no note of the change from Westminster. But I am sure I do not hallucinate it.

Jermyn Street runs parallel to Picadilly a single block south. As Google Maps indicates, it’s a one-way street, westbound from Haymarket to St James Street. A quiet back street, it provides an alternative to the Picadilly bus lane, or going all the way around the system on Pall Mall. Popular with cyclists* — though perhaps Westminster wouldn’t know that, since nobody really bothers to count them.

Except that this is now the view from Haymarket looking down Jermyn Street:

You can see where once a solid white line protected a cycle lane heading west. It has been burned out because this short section of Jermyn Street between Haymarket and Lower Regent Street, marked in red on the map, has been reversed, without even keeping the cycle lane as a contraflow, thus putting an end to this route.

Why? Smoothing the traffic flow, of course. And it’s for the benefit of pedestrians, you know. While pedestrian crossing lights remain at the intersection of Regent and Jermyn Streets (not that they are either necessary or helpful when a static bendy bus has been blocking them for five minutes), since traffic can only turn into, not out of Jermyn Street, a phase of the lights can be eliminated.

You can see the previous arrangement still on Streetview: a bicycle cut through for continuing along Jermyn Street, while preventing motor vehicles using it as a rat-run. Clever of Westminster to get rid of it under the cover of fiddling with the traffic lights.

The only question for which the answer isn’t obvious is whether this work was all of Westminster’s own initiative, or whether TfL put the idea to them.

It’s probably for the best. With all the chaos on Pall Mall and Picadilly, the narrow quiet route west from Regent Street is now choked with trucks and coaches trying to break out of the endless jams around it.

* I used the route frequently on the way to events at the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street, just off Picadilly. In the early nineteenth century, events at the Royal Institution were so popular that Albemarle Street became congested with carriages. After a particularly well attended lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it was made the world’s first one-way street, all in the name of smoothing the flow of this traffic.

Diversions

Mark Wagenbuur boasts that when there are road closures in his part of the world a suitable diversion route is found for people on bicycles.

Well I discovered that we can do bicycle diversions here, too. Look at Horse Guards Road, a popular alternative to the wide but “too narrow for bicycle tracks” Whitehall, and which is currently closed while the Olympic Beach Volleyball equipment is dismantled after the test run. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had thought to put in a cycling route during the road closure.

Do you see it? It’s there, where those people are walking away past the cyclist. I guess they think it’s a footway, silly people.

A cycle diversion was, of course, only possible on this occasion because pedestrians can be pushed out of the way into the spacious (and streetlightless) park.

Interestingly, I noticed that there is advance warning of a weekend closure of the cycle path beside the capacious Mall:

That’s the weekend of the Skyride, whose route is still “to be announced”, but which everyone is assuming will be similar to last year’s, which circumnavigated the park here. Does somebody think that the cycle lane needs to be closed during Skyride?

The man who crossed the road

Brian Haw had a few weird ideas amongst the good ones in his head — in that he was not unusual.  But the weird ones do not mean that we don’t all owe him thanks for the good ideas and the way he acted on them.  For ten years he sat in his deckchair, inches from the trucks and taxis, staring across the road, a constant reminder for the Members of Parliament who were battling their own consciences and their own constituencies to take us to war.  Every once in a while one of our representatives would catch a glimpse in the corner of their eye as they walked past a window or raced across Bridge Street from Whitehall.  They knew they were being watched.

He deserves our thanks for something else, something unintended.  Brian Haw made Parliament Square a place again.  For five decades before Brian Haw pitched his tent, Parliament Square was not a place.  The early newspaper reports on his protest, and on the attempt in 2002 to prosecute him for obstruction of  the pavement, call it what it is: a traffic island.

At its narrower points, Parliament Square is four lanes of traffic.  At its widest, five lanes guide us to various parts of the city.  They multiply and slew off, and whisk us around the sharp corners of the square, stop start through the traffic lights, quick accelerate to be the first to join the back of the next traffic jam.  Sometimes the lanes simply disappear completely and you are pushed into a clear wide expanse of cracked and patched tarmac, taxis to the left of you, articulated trucks to the right, all eyeing up that same middle lane at the next set of lights around the corner.

In 2008 I worked in an office in Fitzrovia, and so Parliament Square was on my morning roller coaster ride from South London — and what a roller coaster ride it is.

Parliament Square is a traffic island not a place.  Churchill looks out from behind the now apparently permanent mess of crowd-control barriers not upon the inheritors of his seat, but down upon the brave new world that rushes past him all day and all through the night, isolating him from human contact.

When, in autumn 2002, Westminster Council attempted to prosecute Brian Haw for obstructing the pavement, the judge threw them out.  Who is he obstructing?  Nobody is trying to walk on this pavement, the judge pointed out, for there is no pedestrian crossing into Parliament Square, and nobody walks out across five lanes of heavy traffic.

But over time the newspaper coverage slowly changed.  The references to Haw’s pitch as an isolated traffic island faded.  Perhaps the authorities actively encouraged this change in perspective, recognising that the Square’s image problem was hindering their campaign against Haw.  It’s difficult to work up opposition to man sat out of the way on a traffic island.  Perhaps it just came naturally, as the Square slowly, occasionally, became a place.  People began to make the crossing — it can be done, so long as you’re fit and fast, most easily from the south-west corner, if you know the square well and learn the cycle and timings of the lights.  They crossed to talk to Brian and bring him food.  Or they crossed to take a closer look at the statues, or to walk amongst the flower borders and trees.  Local office workers even started using the square for lunchtime picnics on sunny days, if they could tolerate the noise and the smog.

But it was still strangled by the vast old-fashioned urban road system.  When the Democracy Village camp moved in and pitched a couple of dozen tents, they were quickly jumped upon for killing the grass.  But what is remarkable is that there was grass there to be killed.  The great squares of the great cities of the world are not turfed.  They are paved, because great squares in great cities draw great crowds, who walk and run and play and dance and march — the things that people do at the other end of Whitehall, unseen by our parliamentarians, in Trafalgar Square.  Grass does not grow in the great city squares of the world, but for sixty years it grew in Parliament Square.

Parliament Square was not designed to be a great city square.  Its turf and lack of crossing points indicate that its designers were deliberately designing out people.  The purpose of Parliament Square was to move motor vehicles from Whitehall to Westminster Bridge, Victoria Street to the Victoria Embankment — as many as possible in as little time as possible.  It was not intended that people would walk amongst the statues or picnic beside the flower beds.  Not only would they disturb the hard-working politicians, they would disturb the traffic.  And until Brian Haw made his camp, people knew that.  Nobody ever made that crossing.  The tourists probably assumed that it was illegal.  This was a traffic island, and that’s what the newspapers called it.

For ten years parliament, Westminster Council, and both our former and current mayors spent an inordinate amount of time trying to evict Brian Haw from his spot on the pavement opposite the palace.  They charged him under every law they could find, and when they ran out, they started passing new ones especially for him.  It became an obsession, with the thought of Haw sat there, staring at them, inciting great vitriol from the members.  Tom Harris (lab) of Glasgow South described Haw’s tents and banners as an eyesore, while Malcolm Rifkind (con) of Kensington went so far as to say that Haw’s camp (and the others who had followed his lead) was an international disgrace.  Both of them felt that the mayor was not acting fast enough in having Haw evicted.

Finally, three weeks ago, as Brian’s protest quietly ticked over its tenth anniversary, the man himself now absent and dying, Westminster Council took the last action that was available to them — action that they had clearly spent nine years desperately hoping to avoid having to take.  They began plans to install a pedestrian crossing onto the Parliament Square traffic island.  The crossing would be in the south-west corner, the option closest to the camp.  With tourists finally able — encouraged, even — to cross the road, protesters could finally be prosecuted for obstructing the pavement.  Westminster Council did not even attempt to disguise their reasons for proposing the crossing.  If it were built, and the protesters successfully evicted, how long do you think the crossing lights would last before quietly being wrapped away behind orange plastic in the night, a lonely “pedestrian diversion” sign left gathering dust on the pavement?

Now that Brian Haw is dead, Westminster might be saved ever having to install a crossing at all.  The Member for Glasgow South can finally stop worrying about being watched and return to the tasks that the people of Cathcart elected him for.  And Parliament Square can go back to being a non-place, a transport corridor sat between church and state.  With a World Heritage Site on one side, and a heaving tube station, the river, and iconic architecture on the other.  In the middle, our little international disgrace.

The out-of-sight commuters that don’t matter to TfL

The sky lightening, I head for a bridge with a scene that would suit a subtle sunrise photograph, as Big Ben rang for four fifteen.  Bored policemen loiter beside their van, parked in the Westminster Bridge bike lane.  Tired taxi drivers inch across advance stop lines and cautiously through red lights.  A refrigerated truck of fresh Dutch imports — tulips, one must assume — obediently follows the satnav’s directions onto the Embankment.  On the pavement before the entrance to Portcullis House is a man in City of Westminster hi-vis vest, bent on hands and knees with a brush and a big barrel of hot soapy water.  Yesterday’s dirt must not be allowed to stick to the soles of our dear leaders.  And three late-teenaged blokes on BSOs head home from the night shifts, back to their mums’ flats on the housing estates of south London, weaving around the tourist-free zone that is the Westminster Bridge footway.  (And why not? The pigeons can’t call You and Yours or have their say in the Daily Mail letters pages.)

Waterloo Bridge is delightfully empty still, thanks to yesterday’s fire.  Somehow, London’s roads seem to have been coping with the reduced capacity.

Most of the traffic is simply diverting to the next bridge — Blackfriars — where, as St Paul’s announces five, they have a sufficiently uninhibited run to hit forty or more before they make it to the red lights and temporary twenty limit at the now infamous north junction.  Dawdling past them on an average hybrid bike without lights (but that’s hardly needed by now anyway), a man in an old helmet and orange hi-viz bib heads north on the pavement.  I stop him briefly to ask him where he’s going and what he knows about pavement cycling.  He can’t talk for long — he’s come from Lewisham and has to hurry on to a zone 1 tube station, I won’t say which, for an early customer services shift.

It shouldn’t surprise anybody that the reason this railwayman was cycling on the pavement is because he is terrified of mixing with vans and minicabs that are autopiloted through a cycle of rapid acceleration, flagrant speeding, and sudden stops as they tour the traffic lights of central London.  He was vaguely aware that he wasn’t actually allowed to cycle on the pavement, but since he only dared cycle in these quiet early hours, with just a sparse scattering of tired night-shifters and early-rising joggers to negotiate, he had a reasonable argument for it being a victimless crime.  He’s only cycling because the trains don’t start early enough.  He would never attempt to cycle anywhere when heading home through the bustling streets of lunchtime, road or pavement.  He isn’t crazy.

You’ll recognise these sunrise pavement cyclists from the work of Dave Horton: they are the people, often poor and marginalised, who cycle despite all of the barriers, just because there really is no alternative.

So when somebody high-up in TfL tells you that speed of motor-vehicles doesn’t matter outside of the rush hour, spare a thought not just for those who want to use their bicycle for things other than a commute, and not just for the schoolchildren whose day does not align with the normal rush, but also for the tens of thousands of Londoners who work non-standard hours, scrubbing the front steps of the powerful and making sure that everybody else’s morning trains run.

TfL directors, it turns out, are failing in their duties to their own staff on the ground.  Who would have believed it possible?

And it wasn't even worth it for the photography. The clouds gathered for a boring grey morning.
And after all that, it wasn't even worth it for the photography. The clouds soon gathered for a boring grey morning.
”]”]

Participatory democracy (London edition)

Central government have decided to roll back their red tape and give power back to the people!  In reality, this is power going to the county and borough councilors (who don’t have the budgets needed to do anything productive with their new powers), or in some cases it could amount to less power for the councilors to resist the pressures of developers.  It is now more important than ever to keep an eye on local developments: to provide the local opposition that the councilors will need if they are to justify turning down bad proposals, and the local support that they need to get funding for good proposals.

For those who don’t care about London (or care about more than just London), I’ll compile another post.

London boroughs Local Implementation Plans

The London Authority requires the boroughs to periodically outline their transport plans for a forthcoming timespan, to compliment the Mayor’s own transport strategy.  The last set of plans were written five years ago; it’s time for the boroughs to produce new ones and consult with their “stakeholders”.  These plans will include specific detailed initiatives for the next few years, but also propose high-level policy directions for the next few decades.  The boroughs should make these plans available for everyone to read, and any of you can give feedback if you think you hold any stake in the future of transport in that borough.  You don’t need to be a resident — you could comment on a borough that you work in, commute through, or even which you never visit, but whose transport plan you think could have knock-on effects on your own borough’s transport situation (I never visit the northern or western outer boroughs, but it is their pro-car policies that help make much of the central area a nasty place to be).

When reading the LIPs, check what the council plans to do to make the city livable — their plans, if any, for calm residential streets, pleasant high streets, and cycling infrastructure that actually works.  And watch out for failed fantasies like “congestion relief” and “smoother traffic flow”.

Here are a few LIPs that might be of interest:

I couldn’t find anything for Hackney, Islington, or Westminster — perhaps those are not ready yet.  I also searched for Waltham Forest, for a laugh, but they too have nothing obvious available for comment so far.  If you can find those, or any other LIPs that are worthy of comment, do let us know.  So far I haven’t looked at the content of any the LIPs except the City, Camden, and Southwark — if you do look at any of the documents and spot anything outstanding or outrageous in them, let us know.

Other stuff that needs action

Email Lambeth Council to oppose the removal of one of the few off-road routes we have in central London — the riverside path:

Subscribe the TfL’s consultations — they include major streetscape changes on the red routes, Bus routes, taxis, etc.

Find your borough’s streets & transport consultations web page — e.g. Lewisham’s is here — and subscribe to it (if the council are too useless to have provided their own feed, you can improvise one with tools like this).  Look out for changes to speed restrictions, official approval of pavement parking, poorly designed one-way systems, etc.  Most consultations are small and dull so get very few responses, and proposals easily go through unopposed — but this means that when people do speak up, they can potentially get noticed more easily.

Also keep an eye on the major projects in the central boroughs — especially Westminster and The City, since these are usually designed to support our current car-centric mess.  Westminster’s transport/streetscapes consultations page was particularly difficult to find, but I believe this is it.  It includes their proposals for half of the grubbier eastern end of Oxford Street, to be built later this year: more car parking spaces and loading bays; helping pedestrians by, erm, pushing them onto other “under-utilised streets” (shove ’em round the back by the bins — that’s gotta be good for business); and no mention of cycling at all.  (Of course, what Oxford Street and its traders desperately need is proper pedestrianisation — but then, this same observation was made in the 1963 Buchanan report and it hasn’t happened yet.)  You have two months to send Westminster your comments on that one.

I must stop the list there, else I won’t have time to respond to any of these plans myself…

The war in pictures: Parliament Square

This post is part of a series by the Campaign For Cycling In London (CCL), the organisation which seeks policies to encourage cycling in the city.

City squares are a major battle ground in the War On The Motorist.  The notoriously anti-car Bristol City Council go so far in persecuting the Motorist that they have even closed major roads in city squares.  You might be thinking that this could never happen in sensible London, but just remember how Ken Livingstone ruined Trafalgar Square by closing a tiny fraction of the road space.  The biggest insult to the Motorist in the city though is not Trafalgar Square, but is in fact just down the road, symbolically placed right in the centre of democracy and government: Parliament Square.

Parliament Square sits at the intersection of a number of major roads; vital arteries of our city.  The Embankments, Victoria Street, Whitehall, Westminster Bridge.  Big roads that are required for Very Important People — like politicians and senior civil servants; commanders of the Metropolitan Police, execs at Channel 4, directors of the National Gallery, and senior management of Transport For London — to go about doing their Very Important Things.  Therefore, Parliament Square has to be one big signal-controlled roundabout, organising traffic.  Nothing else would do the job. Continue reading “The war in pictures: Parliament Square”

On Oxford Street

Wikipedia / GFDL

The Grauniad Bike Blog asks, “why are taxis the king of the road when they carry so few passengers?”  That is, the obvious question that most people in London have been asking for some time, why, given that taxis are responsible for at most one in every 200 commuter journeys in London, and given that for the vast majority of these journeys a taxi is a needless and extravagant luxury, and given that taxis are a major contributor to congestion and pollution, why the fuck do we publicly subsidise their industry by allowing them to use the infrastructure that is supposed to be set aside for the transport modes which actually solve those problems?  Why, when politicians words are of increasing bus and bike share, do their actions say: we don’t care for bus users, we will penalise your transport choice by creating taxi jams to hold up your bus; we don’t care for cyclists, we will force you to share space with some of the widest, tallest, most polluting, and most erratically driven vehicles on the road?

Well, think, dears.  Who uses taxis in London?  The people who can afford it.  Politicians, for example, and the businessmen that fund their parties.  Councillors, mayors, and assemblymen aren’t going to do anything to inconvenience taxi drivers, because that would inconvenience themselves, and perhaps even make the businessman who arranged to buy them lunch late.

And anyway, taxis need to use London’s bus lanes: they need to make sudden swerves into the pavement on a red route, cutting up bicycles and buses, because they need to pick up fares.  It’s in the interest of everybody’s safety if they only brake suddenly in one lane, without having to cut across two.  But still, they would need to use bus lanes for a third reason, because otherwise it would take them hours to get across town, and then how would they be able to compete in the free and fair market for transport modes?

But one bus lane they don’t need to use is Oxford Street.  People who can afford taxis don’t go to Oxford Street.  They go to the arcades of Knightsbridge or Kensington; Smithfield boutiques if they’re trendy; or jump on a Eurostar and combine it with lunch.  So taxis don’t need to go to Oxford Street for their fares.  But do they need to go through Oxford Street in order to avoid the jams on the conventional roads which would amount to an unfair burden on their industry?  Well, according to the BBC, taxi drivers are complaining about how long it takes to get down Oxford Street — because of all the buses and pedestrian crossings full of common non-taxi using plebs getting in their way.

Perhaps Westminster council and the London authority could consider doing a little something to help taxi drivers, by banning them from Oxford Street entirely — thus doing their bit to end the end the war on the motorist, and, in the process, creating the city’s first real bus lane.