Tag: DfT

DfT Looks at Changes to Road Safety Legislation

Posted on by Secretary

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The Department of Transport (DfT) has today made a series of important announcements relating to cycling. They have indicated that they are:

  • Consulting on proposed new offences of causing death or serious injury while cycling and changes to the existing offences of dangerous and careless cycling.
  • Reviewing parts of the Highway Code, including measures to counter the dangerous practice of ‘close passing’ by motorists when overtaking cyclists and other vulnerable road users.
  • Commissioning the Cycle Proofing Working Group to develop national guidance and best practice for cycling and walking infrastructure.
  • Providing £1 million to support pathfinder demonstration projects for repairing and upgrading sections of the National Cycle Network.

The proposed changes to cycling offences are a response to the death of Kim Briggs, who was killed by a cyclist in 2016. She died after being hit by Charlie Alliston, who was riding a ‘fixie’ bike that didn’t have a front brake, which is a legal requirement for use on the public highway.  Alliston was sentenced to 18 months in youth detention after being convicted of the 1861 offence of “wanton and furious driving”, which was seen by many as being disproportionately lenient and exposed the outdated nature of the existing legislation. The DfT is consulting on proposals for a new offence equivalent to causing death by careless or dangerous driving to be introduced for dangerous cycling.  The consultation runs for 12 weeks and closes on 12 August 2018.

The DfT is also looking at updating parts of the Highway Code to counter the dangerous practice of ‘close passing’. This will include a review of rule 163 of the Highway Code which says that motorists should ‘give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car’. Many people feel that this advice is unclear and with close pass incidents becoming more frequent on our congested roads, there is a pressing need to tackle the issue by setting and promoting absolute standards as has been done in other countries. The ‘close pass’ initiative pioneered by West Midlands Police and promoted by Cycling UK advocates a safe overtaking distance of at least 1.5m. This has been shown to be highly effective with significant reductions in the number of reported close pass incidents and the number of cyclists casualties.

Government has previously announced close pass training materials and support for police forces. However, with limited staff resources, close pass initiatives can only be deployed in a handful of areas. For example, Thames Valley Police and the Hampshire Constabulary are currently only targeting Oxford, Portsmouth and Southampton, which are the areas with the highest numbers of cyclist casualties. We would like to see money for more specialist road safety officers to roll this out across the whole of the Thames Valley.

As part of the Cycling and Walking Safety Review, the government has commissioned the Cycle Proofing Working Group to develop national guidance and best practice for cycling and walking infrastructure. Existing government guidance is widely seen as being outdated and inadequate, lagging behind European best practice and that produced by Transport for London.  Although we support the commitment to update national guidance and best practice advice, we feel that this will be of limited value unless it is accompanied by significant and ring-fenced funding that his allocated directly to local authorities.

Finally while we welcome the announcement that £1 million will be provided to support the pathfinder demonstration projects for repairing and upgrading sections of the National Cycle Network, we feel that this is woefully inadequate to address the problems with the NCN.  This token gesture will only tackle a handful of demonstration projects scattered across the UK and it would not even be sufficient to address the existing problems affecting the network in West Berkshire, where bank erosion and surfacing issues have made NCN4 virtually unusable by cyclists for much of its length. We would like to see a sustained commitment to significant investment in order to address the backlog of maintenance issues that are blighting the NCN.

We would be interested to hear the views of SPOKES members and other West Berkshire cyclists on the above issues, so please do get in touch and let us know what you think.

National Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy Published

Posted on by Secretary

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The Department for Transport published its National Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy today. This aims to:

  • Double cycling in terms of the estimated total number of cycle stages made each year, from 0.8 billion stages in 2013 to 1.6 billion stages in 2025.
  • Increase walking activity to 300 stages per person per year in 2025, and
  • Increase the percentage of children aged 5 to 10 that usually walk to school from 49% in 2014 to 55% in 2025.

The target for cycling is eye-catching until you start doing some international comparisons. Even if we achieve our cycling target, then just under 4% of trips will be made by bike in 2025. This is low compared to levels that are already seen now in other European countries, e.g. 5% in France and Italy, 9% in mountainous Switzerland and Austria, 19% in Denmark and 26% in the Netherlands.

Our view is that the target is distinctly unambitious – the ‘Get Britain Cycling’ inquiry report, which was published in 2013 and strongly backed by MPs of all parties, businesses and the media – called for targets to boost cycle use to roughly German levels (10% of trips) by 2025 and to near-Dutch levels (25%) by 2050.

A headline grabbing £1.2 billion is being allocated to help deliver these aims over the next five years, with a breakdown as follows

  • £50 million to provide Bikeability training for a further 1.3 million children
  • £101 million to improve cycling infrastructure
  • £85 million to make improvements to 200 sections of roads for cyclists
  • £80 million for safety and awareness training for cyclists, extra secure cycle storage, bike repair, maintenance courses and road safety measures
  • £389.5 million for councils to invest in walking and cycling schemes
  • £476.4 million from local growth funding to support walking and cycling
  • £5 million on improving cycle facilities at railway stations

This sounds great until you realise that it is just a tiny fraction of the overall transport budget (approximately 1.3%). In London alone, Sadiq Khan has committed £770 million to improving cycling facilities in the capital city during his term in office – that’s a rate of £17 per person per year compared to just over £5 per person per year that will be spent on the rest of England’s populace. Also, much of this funding is already available through existing or committed transport spending, which is allocated as unringfenced grant funding to councils and Local Enterprise Partnerships and may therefore be siphoned off to be spent on other priorities.

It is interested to note that some of the main transport pressure groups appear to have been largely bought off by the promise of funding for their pet projects:

Despite there being little improvement in the content and ambition of the strategy compared to the draft version, the responses from these organisation has been distinctly muted this time compared to their original responses and even heaping praise on the Government saying how much they are looking forward to working with them to deliver the strategy. This is disappointing to say the least.

The strategy promotes Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans (LCWIPs), aimed at enabling local authorities to develop their own plans. However these are voluntary, and even for those local authorities that are interested and willing to prepare them, the lack of clear, high-quality cycling design guidance remains a major concern. The strategy suggests that there will at some point be a ‘refresh’ of LTN 2/08 ‘Cycle Infrastructure Design’, which provides design guidance for those involved in developing new cycling schemes. Given the length of time that has elapsed between the consultation on the draft strategy and the publication of the final version, this is disappointing.  The UK has a history of building some mediocre cycling infrastructure that is some way below the best practice examples seen in leading cycling nations such as the Netherlands and Denmark.

While it is great to see the Government finally publish a strategy that articulates a national approach to promoting cycling and walking, Spokes is disappointed that they have not been more ambitious in their aims and funding commitments and that opportunities to promote best practice design standards have not been taken.