Cycle Lifestyle

#19. AVOIDING A TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS. The current transport situation in London is a ‘tragedy of the commons’. To understand what this crucial phrase means, a little explanation is necessary.

In a famous essay published in 1968, the biologist Garett Hardin coined the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ in order to describe the process by which shared pastures are prone to overgrazing. The problem, he noted, is that any farmer using common land perceives that he can benefit by allowing his animals to eat as much of the vegetation as possible (and by grazing as many animals as possible). But soon the land’s limited resources are at risk of depletion, leaving nothing for anyone. This is the worst outcome for the farmers, yet each of them can be led to contributing to its eventuality by a compelling chain of reasoning.

Imagine you are a farmer with a decision to make about whether or not to restrict your animals’ grazing. If you don’t restrict them, you stand to gain, whatever everyone else does: if everybody else restricts their animals and you don’t, you’ll get a bigger share of the land’s resources; and if nobody restricts their animals and you don’t, you’ll still get a bigger share of the land’s resources than you would have done through exercising restraint. The ‘tragedy’ occurs when every farmer makes this calculation, so that the land, and each and every one of them, ends up worse off than if the commons hadn’t been exploited.

Hardin’s description isn’t just applicable to farmers. All kinds of groups can get locked into a permanently suboptimal state of functioning whenever their members reckon that it’s in their interests to succumb to the temptation of anti-social behaviour.

London’s transport situation provides another example. Every day millions of Londoners use their cars for commuting, doing the shopping, taking the kids to and from school, and numerous other errands – the capital is a big place, and there’s no time to waste. But it’s not that big, certainly not enough to contain all those cars. Rather than cruising round an airfield or a Swiss mountain bend – what people imagine they’re signing up for when buying a car – driving in London is more like moving furniture in a bedsit. The traffic is jammed in a frenzy of beeping, road rage, revving and fumes, with hardly a parking space in site, while crack-squads of commission-paid traffic wardens stalk the pavements slapping £120 fines on windscreens. Dystopia is putting it mildly.

Driving in London (and most other urban spaces) is tragic insofar as road users calculate that, whatever everyone else does, using the car is a better option than walking or cycling. The reckoning is: if the minority drives then it’s quicker and better to take the car; and if the majority drives then it’s still better to take the car because congested streets are too terrifying and polluted for cycling or walking on. The upshot is the furious gridlock familiar to anyone who has driven on, say, the North Circular in rush-hour.

And, worse, it’s not just the participants in the tragedy who are involved. For one thing, everyone in London is affected negatively. Because car-filled streets are unpleasant and dangerous, especially for vulnerable residents such as children and senior citizens, wider society ends up paying for the consumer habit of one segment. Cars are also less sociable: they seclude their occupants behind windscreens, thus decreasing the sense of community and making everyone worse off.

Another especially bad thing about the tragedy of the commons car drivers cause is that it enables a segment of society to devilishly benefit from the tragic behavior of others. Specifically, producers of cars are the beneficiaries, making money on the back of that compelling chain of reasoning which leads Londoners to buy a car despite the collective harms. As a society we are therefore compromised doubly: our suffering is a cohort’s gain.

How do we break out of London’s transportation tragedy of the commons? An obvious answer is to get more people cycling. This could be achieved in part by convincing vast numbers of Londoners of the health, financial and well-being benefits of cycling, but most importantly by insisting that the traffic on the capital’s streets only seems to be too dangerous for cycling. In recent years, many cyclists have woken up to the fact that cycling is perfectly safe if you take care and ride sensibly (don’t undertake vehicles turning left, for instance). The problem is, these cyclists are very much in the minority. Most Londoners remain adamant that the traffic makes it too dangerous to cycle, so they take their cars instead. And so the tragedy persists. Traffic is the fear of traffic incarnate.

Simon Parker’s London Cycle Map offers a realistic way of side-stepping this tragedy of the commons. His plan shows how we could install road markings and signs on the streets of the London Cycle Network (which are generally safer and quieter), enabling would-be cyclists to get from anywhere to anywhere in the capital by following just a few coloured routes, like on the Tube. This would remove the fear-factor associated with cycling, because the terrifying traffic on the capital’s major roads would mostly be an irrelevance on the routes of the London Cycle Map.

After experiencing the benefits of cycling using Parker’s London Cycle Map, millions of Londoners would soon lose the temptation to slip back into their car driving ways. But, even if they did slip back occasionally, this wouldn’t impact on others’ decision whether or not to cycle. The routes of the London Cycle Map would mostly be insulated from the dynamic of fear which causes cars to proliferate in urban spaces. (In contrast, the LCC's Go Dutch campaign is promising only to insulate a few segments of main road, which would still leave cyclists exposed to fear for most of their journeys.)  

Tragedies of the commons can be solved only when all the participants or their representatives agree to take steps to avoid the tragedy. Farmers, for instance, can co-operate to keep land sustainable, or – in another example – fishermen can co-operate to avoid depleting fisheries.

In order to solve the transport tragedy of the commons in London we need the authorities to co-operate, by signing and marking the thousands of kilometres of safe cycling streets making up the London Cycle Network with the routes featured on Parker’s London Cycle Map. Alas, our political leaders and civil servants don’t seem to be interested. So the rest of us will have to stop being sheep, and start demanding the solution.

www.petition.co.uk/london-cycle-map-campaign

#21. TELLING IT LIKE IT IS. In an astonishing exaggeration, the LCC announced today: ‘Mayor tells Transport for London to Go Dutch’.

He did nothing of the sort! Boris Johnson sent a letter to the LCC which vaguely waffled about mandates, jobs, modernisation and task forces, then added this:

“I have asked TfL to review the “Go Dutch” campaign to ascertain how the principles it establishes can be incorporated into the design and implementation of cycling schemes in London, taking into account the UK legal framework and regulations, the physical constrains of London’s streets, and the needs of all road users.”

Hallelujah, a review! A review which will take into account the ‘physical constraints of London’s streets’ (which I have previously drawn attention to) and ‘the needs of all road users’ (which I have also drawn attention to), and will no doubt conclude that there is scope for approximately... three new Go Dutch schemes on main roads this mayoralty, just as the LCC ‘demanded’.

Can I be the first to say what a waste of money this whole pantomime is?

I don’t know the exact budgets of TfL and the LCC, but TfL is spending over a hundred million pounds on the Cycle Superhighways alone (so basically its cycling budget is enormous), while the LCC boasts around 11,000 members who pay (a maximum rate of) £34 per annum, and it receives funding from charitable grants, TfL and local authorities, as well as through ad revenue from its website and the London Cyclist magazine.

And for all this investment, what's the best that the LCC and TfL can come up with? Respectively, a marketing-led proposal to make London more like Holland and a review of that proposal – a proposal which, even if successful, would require centuries to turn London into a cycling city.

The best thing the LCC has come up with is their ‘Love London’ slogan – and that was presumably inspired by Cycle Lifestyle's (without any acknowledgement of our magazine or of the work we have put into distributing 90,000 free cycling magazines in London over the last three years).

The saddest thing is, there will be no outcry. The LCC’s members will diligently record onto a new interactive map the locations of London’s most dangerous cycling roads and junctions (as if TfL doesn’t already know where they are), and TfL will diligently decline to upgrade the cycling infrastructure on the vast majority of those roads and junctions because of the ‘physical constraints of London’s streets’ and the ‘needs of all road users’.

And while those LCC members fiddle around with their smart phones – inputting data and feeling empowered – the internet will suck up their enthusiasm like the perfect totalitarian sponge.

With the combined money and manpower of TfL and the LCC, not to mention their members, we could, by now, have fitted out the London Cycle Network to a truly world-class standard. The thirty years of investment which have already gone into that network could have been built on, to create the brilliant system of long, straight routes depicted on Parker’s London Cycle Map. Any remaining dodgy parts of the network could have been developed many times over, and Londoners could then have ridden from anywhere to anywhere in the capital on safer, quieter streets, following just a few coloured routes, like on the Tube.

Instead, we’ve got a marketing blitz promising to make London more like Holland, three new cycle schemes at a time.

At that rate, the only way London is going to end up like Holland is when they’re both under water due to global warming.

www.petition.co.uk/london-cycle-map-campaign

#23. STRIKEPROOF. Every time there’s a major public transport strike in London there’s a surge in cycling, and a surge of interest in the London Cycle Map Campaign.

What happens is that the millions of Londoners who are affected by the strike have to find an alternative way to get to work, and they often choose to cycle (on a hire bike or their own) to avoid the inevitable spillover crowds on other transport systems.

These intrepid new cyclists then log on to Google and type ‘London Cycle Map’, expecting to find out where London’s cycle routes are, to plan a route to work. But what these people find to their disappointment is a monstrous LCN map and a bunch of TfL paper guides that’ll take days to receive in the post. Too late. And 12 maps for the whole capital is too cumbersome.

These new cyclists also find, more encouragingly, that Simon Parker has created a Tube-style map of London’s cycle routes. If the authorities installed road signs and markings corresponding to Parker’s diagram, cyclists could get from anywhere to anywhere in the capital by following just a few coloured routes, like on the Tube. This would make riding to work really easy.

Sadly, the surge in cycling caused by public transport strikes doesn’t get sustained, because new cyclists are put off by the hassle of travelling across London by bike. A London Cycle Map would change this. As well as encouraging new cyclists to give it a go, it would encourage them to keep at it.

At the very least, a London Cycle Map would make the capital strikeproof, enabling Londoners to get around simply and easily whenever public transport runs aground.

www.petition.co.uk/london-cycle-map-campaign

#25. NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, HERE'S THE LONDON CYCLE MAP.

Public discourse these days is full of bollocks.

There are tedious debates between left and right – socialism versus capitalism – even though everyone knows (or should do) that public spending and a thriving economy are both necessary to a civilised society.

There is relentless pessimism, fearmongering and moral outrage in the media, even though the world is more prosperous, peaceful and humane than ever before.

There are pesky adverts everywhere, covering every available surface like a plague of crane flies, while marketers' profits rise in proportion to consumers' insecurity levels.

There is nonsense-a-plenty vomited onto the billions of websites which now dominate our social lives, while real communities wither under the electrical glow. Meanwhile, well-meaning activists seek to use online technology for good ends, forever pushing the rock of morality up a mountain of indifference, of youtube clips, video games and twitterings piled sky high.

Never mind the bollocks – here’s the London Cycle Map.

It’s a picture of some of the best, safest and quietest cycle routes in the capital. It shows how to simplify these routes by organising them into long straight lines. If we install the right road markings and signs, cyclists could ride from anywhere to anywhere in the capital by following a few of these coloured routes, just like on the Tube. This would benefit all those people who (in part thanks to the media) are currently too scared to cycle.

The London Cycle Map would make the capital a happier and healthier place.

www.petition.co.uk/london-cycle-map-campaign