Southampton Cycling Forum
I attended the meeting of the Southampton Cycling Forum this evening. This is a public meeting chaired by Transport offers from the Council, Dale Bostock the Cycling Development Officer, and the Transport Policy Team Leader whose name I didn’t catch. They are both cyclists, afaict.
The meeting was attended by several members of the Southampton Cycling Campaign, as well as a number of other people, including John Waugh, who retired from his post as the University’s Transport Manager last year. Most of them seemed to know each other, and I guess they’d all been along to previous meetings.
The scary part was, oh my, we, this odd-ball bunch of cyclists, we are discussing cycling plans for the Council with the people who make these things real. Once, when I was young, I wrote some letters to my City Council asking for an island at a dangerous crossing near my school. I don’t know who else got involved, but we got the island. There are traffic lights there now. When I did that, it didn’t feel like I was interacting with a person. There was this black box that you sent letters to and magically islands popped up (or more likely didn’t). And here /we/ were discussing the details of this or that cycle lane. Me! Oh my!
Okay, I’m not grown up yet 
And really, the intention of the meeting wasn’t to discuss the details of the cycle lane, although one chap was keen to express his concerns about a particular piece of lane that had apparently been discussed in previous meetings. I still haven’t worked out where Elephant and Castle /is/, but the general point was taken up - suppose a cycle lane is running along the side of a road, and there’s an island in the road - for pedestrians crossing or what have you - that makes it narrower, sufficiently narrow that there isn’t room for a cyclist and a lorry or large van to continue side by side - then is it safer to continue the path through the island, even though a large vehicle must encroach on it, or is it safer to stop the path some distance before the island?
John Waugh made the point that “a safe cyclist is a confident cyclist”, which was taken up by another person present–the intent being that cyclists who *feel confident* cycle more safely. On Shirley High Street and Portswood lots of cyclists feel more comfortable on the pavement - but having more cyclists on the pavement won’t get them a better status/presence on the roads—which is necessary if they are to be properly taken notice of by cars. Cyclists should be a part of the traffic movement rather than a protected species!, someone said. (This perhaps relates to all the highway code hoo-ha, which was only very briefly mentioned at the end of the meeting… )
It was interesting to hear them discuss Shirley High Street (which I cycled down today) as an example of the thinking of transport planners several years ago, who were trying to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths (apparently it has been successful, but there are still quite a few accidents down there), Portswood as something more recent, but still nothing like today’s thinking, and London Road as the modern, quite different kind of scheme. I have no idea what is happening in London Road, except that it’s currently closed, and I got myself into a position where I didn’t know what the highway code said I should do at the right turn off it. I will be interested to see the results when it’s done.
An attendee proposed 20mph signs in Shirley; the transport policy dude said that there was no use having speed limit signs unless the road layout made drivers want to drive at the speed limit. The proposer felt that having the signs would gradually change people’s view of the area and wouldn’t cost much to /try/. I wondered about those of us who use bicycles to get around and would like to travel at >20mph if the roads allowed it…
They’re investigating accident data, apparently, as part of a new scheme where they try and get down to the cause of the accident and not just its location. Southampton apparently has lowering accident rates. Every time I read bbc / hampshire someone else has been in a fatal accident. Contrary to trends in the rest of the country, even our cyclist deaths are lowered, apparently. There was a project comparing police accident statistics with what the hospitals see. It seems it doesn’t correlate very well. I loved the use of the phrase “transactions on the network”, it sounded so computer-science, although of course it was referring to traffic network.
Next up was Al Gore, the university’s transport manager, telling us a bit about cycling in Southampton University. Al himself cycles, and sees cycling as something one does to get somewhere—just as I see my bicycle as my “car” and tend to be surprised when people are surprised by my, you know, travelling on it. He’d like to encourage people in the university to think of bikes as a practical means to get to and from the university. This is achieved, he said, by
- discouraging cars (for example, parking at the uni is difficult)
- providing a good network of cycle paths around the uni
- providing secure cycle parking facilities
Apparently we have cycle parking facilities for around 1500 bikes. A target of parking for one in five students and one in twenty staff (that’s really not many, is it?) would be 4000-5000. He’s working on it, looking at different kinds of secure stores and so on.
He went on to tell us about the university’s new cycling initiative, which will be running from next September, the oybike scheme. It’s a scheme which has been tried out in Hammersmith and East London, and been very successful; fully automatic bike rental. Rental is free for the first 30 minutes, which means that for most usage (halls-campus or between campuses), it’ll be free. It’s subsidised by advertising on the bikes themselves - key advertisers are of all people, Renault. Initially, there will be relatively small numbers of bikes available, but hopefully if it’s well used more will be added? It seems like a scheme that would benefit from having a lot of bikes, or there’s a danger of them all ending up in the same place. Also, students tend to travel in groups… Finally, unless one could be pretty sure of the bike being there, you couldn’t rely on it when calculating a leaving time. The vision would ultimately include a network operated by the town which would hook into this one, so that one could, say, cycle from the uni to the station and leave a bike there. It sounds pretty cool, and the bikes themselves look interesting. No chains!
Someone proposed that students basically aren’t the issue, everyone knows students cycle, but what about the staff? For adults, cars are seen as a status symbol, the cyclists are the oddballs. This is apparently one of the reasons the council and the police are trying to get more of their staff seen out and about town on bikes - have you seen the policemen working on bicycles? I have. Apparently cycle stands are designed, at some expense, to look pretty and be made of shiny materials, to encourage their use and give them status. There was some discussion of the car share schemes - WhizzGo and StreetCar, both of which operate in Southampton, which are available to people who generally cycle but need a car for occasional use. Not everyone knows about these things; how do we get the information out there? In the university they go into the Bulletin and notices in Unilink buses. I never use the buses (what with cycling everywhere) and I rarely see a the Bulletin. In the town it goes into the Echo; perhaps there are leaflets in October Books (I don’t know. There should be!).
One last thing: the dudes in the Council are spending people’s money, and they have to justify the expense. For every letter they get from a cyclist, they get a hundred from motorists. So it’s a lot easier for them to justify spending on motorists. If you like the cycle provisions, write (or email) and say so—then there’s some chance they’ll be maintained. If you don’t like them, write and say so. If you don’t come to forum meetings (there were free biscuits…) or feel the need for active involvement or … because you’re quite happy just pootling around town on your bike already, *write and say so*. Get yourself counted as a cyclist!
We wrapped up with a list of dates, including on 7 July a day ride on the Isle of Wight for the three cycling forums of Portsmouth, Southampton, and IoW to meet and spend the day discussing all the issues that got cut short this time. Interested? Go along! (Apparently it clashes with the first day of the Tour de France, though … ). I’ll try and get the rest of the dates on the webpage.
All opinions my own; I hope I haven’t misrepresented the meeting. The chair of the Southampton Cycling Campaign welcomed me afterwards and invited me to their meetings, which are in the FMH off London Road on the second Monday of the month.