Over the Hills and Far Away

Dear Mr Shelbrooke

I am writing to you with feedback with regard to your proposed cash card system for benefits. I will be open with you, I have a number of problems with your proposal, which seems to define the term “nanny state,” and which I believe is deeply un-Conservative. However, leaving that particular issue aside, my problems are:

My local market is cheaper for staples (meat, vegetables, toilet paper, tinned goods), than the local supermarkets. None of the stallholders take cards.

The local supermarkets are mostly of the Tesco Express and Sainsbury’s Local variety, which sell a smaller range of goods at higher prices, so people who currently shop at the market would have to pay more for a smaller range of food, with obvious nutritional disadvantages. People on benefits are already living on a tight budget, this would make their budget even tighter.

By forcing people to shop in certain places, this would skew local economics. It would unfairly deprive local traders of sales, possibly driving them out of business, and increase the profits of large multinationals, one of which already gets approximately 1 in every £8 spent on the high street. The administration of this scheme would presumably also be handed over (for a price) to Visa or Mastercard.

This doesn’t seem right to me.

Even in this electronic age, there are still some transactions which need cash. As an example, many large supermarkets are not easy to get to on foot, and are a bus ride away. My highly scientific survey (a question asked on Twitter at 7:20pm), reveals that there are many places where cash is the only way to pay for occasional bus trips, meaning that a cheaper shop which takes cards becomes inaccessible when people have no cash to pay for the bus.

This also has implications for people who are unemployed and looking for work. If they need cash to pay for their bus fare to the job interview, how can they get to their interview if all their benefits are paid onto a card which they cannot use for bus fares?

I can easily see a “black market” situation arising, where benefit claimants who need cash (to pay for school trips for their children, or the bus to job interviews), buy “approved” groceries for people in exchange for cash, the “exchange rate” to be determined by the person with the cash.

I am also concerned by the definition of “luxury,” and “essential,” purchases. Who gets to decide if a foodstuff is a luxury and not allowed, or an essential and permitted? How finely-grained will it be? What about low-alcohol wine? A diet of white bread and chips and limited vegetables due to restricted access to shops, is probably worse for you than the odd glass of wine on a Friday night – will the card monitor this? Are books and toys for children luxuries or essentials?

You said yourself in your speech that this is a measure aimed at “alter[ing] the spending habits of a minority who for far too long have taken advantage of the system,” and that “strivers and low-paid workers most need a supportive society where they are given the respect most deserve in trying to make work pay.” However, by putting all benefits onto this cash card, you will be penalising the low-paid recipients of benefits by removing from them the ability to chose where to spend their money, and stigmatising them as scroungers who cannot be trusted to spend their money without the dead hand of the State controlling them.

[I didn't send this next paragraph to Mr Shelbrooke. I thought it might be too emotive and not helpful].

Someone smuggled a large crate of red lipsticks into the convoys carrying aid to the survivors of Auschwitz. When the military and Red Cross discovered this, they were angry that the cargo space needed for food and medical supplies had been taken up with something so ridiculous as lipstick. Starving, terrified women who had been living under sentence of death immediately began to paint their lips, which was a first step towards feeling human again. It is the “luxuries” which acknowledge our humanity. By saying to people that they do not have the “right” to buy lipstick or a packet of cigarettes, you are denying a part of their humanity.

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I’ve done one of those bucket lists, which I am anticipating will keep me busy for the next fifty years or so, given that I have no intention of shuffling off this mortal coil quite yet.

If I’ve been clever, you can see it here.

Some is fairly close to home (Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret’s Church is embarrassingly just down the road and I’ve never been in), some might be a bit harder to achieve (there’s a reason Inaccessible Island isn’t on the list).

Some will be grouped together, such as cycling along the Kennet and Avon Canal to Bath and spending the weekend there, and by walking the South West Coast Path I’ll have covered the Dorset and East Devon Coast World Heritage Site.

Someone saw the list and said it looked a bit keen and healthy. I’m staying in a four-poster bed in York, and the first thing I’ll be doing when I’ve cycled to bath is crawling into the Thermae Spa, so it’s probably not all jolly hockey sticks and keenness.

There’s a map, with little flags stuck in it.

Anyway. Come along for the ride…

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In response to this letter.

23rd February 2012

Dear [rosamundi]

Thank you for contacting me recently regarding road safety for cyclists and the related Times “Cities Fit for Cycling” campaign.

I appreciate the importance of encouraging more people to cycle and to cycle safely and I agree that the Government and local authorities should consider ways to help improve cycle use and safety.

I welcome The Times’ “Cities fit for cycling” campaign which has been very effective in highlighting the importance of improving road safety for cyclists and I hope that MPs have an opportunity to debate the issue and The Times’ eight point manifesto in the House of Commons.

The previous Labour Government also looked very carefully at this issue and introduced a range of measures to improve cycle safety and cycle use including a national cycle strategy, the introduction of local cycling plans and dedicated funding and resources for cycle training and safety, especially among children. Indeed, in the last decade casualties have reduced by 17% while cycle use grew by 20%.

I agree, however, that more needs to be done to further improve safety for cyclists and I am concerned that this may be hindered by the Government’s decision to cut local authority funding by 27% over the next four years, as local authorities play a particularly important role in ensuring local road safety.

I welcome the “Cities Fit for Cycling” campaign and I can assure you that I will continue to press the Government to improve cycle safety and use.

I have therefore written to the Transport Minister Mike Penning MP to raise your concerns and to ask for further information on the Government’s plans in this area.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to me with your concerns. If you have any further concerns about this or any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Yours sincerely

[proper signature in pen]

Lyn Brown
Member of Parliament for West Ham

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Alarm went off at oh my word it’s early o’clock this morning, and I stumbled to the kitchen for coffee, morning prayer, and chocolate porridge, it being too cold for my usual breakfast of a fruit/milk/oats/banana smoothie. (Chocolate porridge is normal porridge with slightly too much Waitrose seriously chocolatey chocolate spread stirred in at the end, if you were wondering).

Porridge consumed, Sub tuum praesidium prayed, I heaved the bike out of the shed. I was riding Felicity, the nearly-sensible mountain bike hybrid with 21 gears, since I had booked it in for a service at my friendly local bike shop this evening.

This turned out to be fortunate.

I made it safely through Bow Interchange and onto Mile End Road, bimbling along, full of porridge and early-morning goodwill to all mankind.

This didn’t last.

I was waiting in an advanced stop box on a red light when a van pulled up next to me, on my right. A fairly common occurrence, this, so I checked to see if he was doing any of the things that would indicate a left turn at the junction, such as using indicators, position of hands on wheel, looking left, looking at his sat nav. All the indications were that he was going straight on.

The lights changed, we set off, and he immediately did a left turn directly across my path.

That wasn’t very nice of him.

He hit the bike’s front wheel, and the laws of physics being unbending when you don’t have a Large Hadron Collider about your person, I promptly fell off and landed on my bum in the road with a slightly-mangled bike on top of me.

Fortunately it was early in the morning and there was nothing behind us, so I didn’t have to worry about being hit by the car behind, and since we were both pulling away from the lights we were moving quite slowly.

I was picked up off the road and dusted down by another cyclist, who walked me to my friendly local bike shop, who took me in, made appropriate cooing noises, gave me a cup of tea and a sit down and took the bike downstairs for its service.

And then I stood up and very, very nearly screamed out loud.

“Hmm,” I thought. “Perhaps a trip to casualty would be advisable after all? It’s not far, I’ll walk.”

Yes, I am an idiot.

Off I staggered to A&E, I narrowly escaped being strapped to a backboard, was told sternly to put my phone away and not tweet, and they nearly took my eReader off me as well until I persuaded them that it wasn’t a wireless one.

I was thoroughly poked, prodded and X-rayed, told that I hadn’t broken my neck or my head or my hip or anything, that I was just bruised and had sprained my wrist, and next time I’m knocked off just down the road would I mind awfully calling an ambulance instead of wandering into the NHS walk-in centre two hours later going “err, got knocked off my bike, can you tell me where casualty is please?” because it’s a lot less hassle that way?

So, the bike needs a new front wheel, I need to buy a week’s season ticket for the Tube and a new cycle helmet, just to be on the safe side. Could have been worse. The moleskin skirt took the brunt of the road, which is a bit rough on the moles, but less rough on my legs, my gloves are wrecked (but my hands aren’t), and I was riding the mountain bike hybrid with the cheap and easy to replace front wheel, rather than the Pashley with the awkward and expensive to replace one.

I’ve reported it to the police as a failure to stop at the scene of an accident, I await developments.

While you’re here, do you mind signing The Times’ Cities fit for Cycling petition and the London Cycling Campaign’s Love London, Go Dutch one? Thank you.

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The Times Newspaper has today launched its Cities Fit for Cycling campaign, calling for our streets to be made safer for all road users. I don’t agree with some of their points, and I think some don’t go far enough (yes, I know, my middle names are Ungrateful and Never-Satisfied), but it’s a start. The campaign is outside The Times’ firewall. I urge you to go and read it and sign up.

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to my MP Lyn Brown today. Bow Interchange marks the western boundary of her constituency, which is partly why I keep banging on about it. Also I have to cycle through it twice a day and it scares me witless.

As a constituent who commutes by bike from Stratford to Green Park most days, I urge you to support The Times newspaper’s Cities Fit for Cycling campaign, and to urge the Mayor of London and the Minister for Roads to take notice of the deaths and serious injuries taking place on roads they control.

There is nothing that would make me feel safer on London’s roads than properly thought-out, segregated cycling infrastructure. Blue paint costing between two and four million pounds per mile, four times as much as New York’s recent (and much better) scheme, does nothing to reduce accidents; and has made road safety worse at Bow Interchange.

Only investment in real infrastructure will make a difference. The changes happening on this city’s roads may well “smooth traffic flow”, but they are both objectively and subjectively dangerous for vulnerable road users, and relegate cyclists and pedestrians to a poor second and third place behind cars and lorries.

It is not right that the Mayor of London is deliberately endangering your constituents by this policy, which is shortening pedestrian crossing times, removing pedestrian crossings altogether, and refusing to put them in at Bow Interchange despite consultants’ reports saying they were necessary, because it would “introduce significant delays to traffic.” That junction is so dangerous that vulnerable road users, such as the elderly, those with small children, and the disabled, take the bus one stop to avoid having to negotiate sixteen lanes of speeding traffic on foot.

Sadly, this is not really an option for cyclists, which is why two people were killed at Bow in the space of three weeks in the latter part of last year.

Having vulnerable road users deliberately placed in a position of danger as they share the road with vehicles weighing many tonnes is a recipe for disaster. All it takes is a moment of inattention from a lorry driver and the cyclist suffers catastrophic injuries which, if not immediately fatal, are devastating and life-changing, leading to months in hospital and permanent disability.

The Times’ eight-point manifesto is:

1. Trucks entering a city centre should be required by law to fit sensors, audible truck-turning alarms, extra mirrors and safety bars to stop cyclists being thrown under the wheels.

2. The 500 most dangerous road junctions must be identified, redesigned or fitted with priority traffic lights for cyclists and Trixi mirrors that allow lorry drivers to see cyclists on their near-side.

3. A national audit of cycling to find out how many people cycle in Britain and how cyclists are killed or injured should be held to underpin effective cycle safety.

4. Two per cent of the Highways Agency budget should be earmarked for next generation cycle routes, providing £100 million a year towards world-class cycling infrastructure. Each year cities should be graded on the quality of cycling provision.

5. The training of cyclists and drivers must improve and cycle safety should become a core part of the driving test.

6. 20mph should become the default speed limit in residential areas where there are no cycle lanes.

7. Businesses should be invited to sponsor cycleways and cycling super-highways, mirroring the Barclays-backed bicycle hire scheme in London.

8. Every city, even those without an elected mayor, should appoint a cycling commissioner to push home reforms.

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The Emirates Cable Car. Originally intended to be a pedestrian and cyclist bridge, this is now a cable car. Every time I turn around, TfL are looking at their feet in a furtive manner and saying “erm, it’s going to cost a bit more than we thought.” Originally supposed to cost £25million, entirely paid for out of private sponsorship, the cost is now an estimated £60million, with Emirates airlines paying £35million of that cost over 10 years in exchange for the two stations bearing their name and their corporate red adorning the Tube map. The remaining £25million is coming out of Transport for London’s rail budget.

The cable car will be integrated into the Oyster network. So, instead of a pedestrian and cyclist bridge which would cost a lot less than £60million and would be free at the point of use, east London is getting a cable car which is costing nearly two and a half times more than the initial estimate and will cost money to use. There is a charity in London whose aims and objectives are specifically to build and maintain bridges across the Thames. This crossing could have been built at almost no cost to London’s taxpayers and transport users.

I’m not entirely sure that it will have the regenerative effect on the area that it’s hoped. I suspect it will end up being a tourists’ plaything, rather than a useful addition to the transport options of Londoners, and I can’t see the rail service taking a £25million hit to its budget and coming out unscathed on the other side.

It also runs through London City Airport’s Public Safety Zone (“Crash Zone”) so there’s no danger of anything going wrong there at all, is there?

Cycle Superhighways. According to Cyclists in the City, these:

…routes have cost between £10-20 million each. The four routes are, respectively, 2.7, 5.1, 5.7 and 7.2 miles long. At a rough average of 5 miles each then, London’s cycle super highways cost between £2 – 4 million per mile. And they are either pieces of infrastructure that were already there five years ago or, just when you actually need them to keep you safe, nothing more than blue paint…

That’s some expensive blue paint, right there. Oh, yes, there’s a few Trixie mirrors (that are only any use when the lorry driver is in exactly the right position at the junction, and remembers to look in them), and a few Sheffield stands. Forgive me, please, if I don’t leave my beloved Pashley locked up in the open outside Mile End tube station all day. I suspect the odds are not high that when I came back she would still be in the condition I left her in, or, indeed, still there at all.

Skyrides. 50,000 people, all liberally festooned in bright yellow hi-viz covered in sponsors’ logos, cycling round a prescribed route of closed roads on one day a year. This is not the same as, for example, providing safe cycle infrastructure to be used on a daily basis by people using bikes to get to work and the shops and to take their kids to school.

This is all the politics of the grand gesture. Let’s not think about how to actually make transportation better for people who live and work in London, but let’s throw eye-watering sums of money at something which doesn’t solve the problem but masks what the problem is.

The problem is that crossing the river east of Tower Bridge is remarkably difficult. The obvious solution would be a bridge. But bridges aren’t sexy, and you can’t easily get a corporate sponsor for a project which isn’t sexy. I know, let’s build a cable car instead. It costs loads more but it looks cool.

The problem is that London’s Tube network is screaming at the seams. The solution is to get more people cycling instead, but cycling in London is both subjectively dangerous and objectively dangerous. So you propose to build “safer, faster, and more direct” cycle routes into the city, but that conflicts with Transport for London’s aim of “smoothing traffic flow.”

As an example, putting toucan crossings in at Bow Interchange, which is the easiest way of providing safe pedestrian and cyclist crossings at that junction, would “ push the junction over capacity and introduce significant delays to traffic.” Taking road space away from cars in order to create segregated cycle infrastructure would also cause unnaceptable delays to traffic, and so the cylists are thrown a sop in the form of a few gallons of bright blue paint which don’t improve safety at all and for some unfathomable reason cost £2-4 million per mile. The one piece of segregated infrastructure on the superhighway network that I know of is along Cable Street, and was already there. All Transport for London did was paint it blue.

The Skyrides, and, I presume, by extension, the cycling festival that is being proposed for next year, have the stated aim of encouraging more people to see London as a safe, fun place to cycle, and encourage them to do more of it. Only they don’t. To get to the central London Skyride, people still have to cycle along streets crammed with cars and buses, and when you get there you’re practically forced to wear a high-viz vest and are marshalled along a prescribed route with people being jolly at you through megaphones. I loathe hi-viz and forced jollity makes me even more of a curmudgeonly old bat than I usually am. The route’s nice enough, but it’s not useful. The only places you can stop are at the appointed areas, where there is more enforced jollity and various places for you to be relieved of cash and personal data. You can’t actually use the route as a traffic-free way of getting to places because it’s all fenced off with crash barriers.

And as for the high-viz vest? It reinforces the impression that cycling is a dangerous activity which must only be undertaken in specialised clothing in a variety of lurid colours. The Skyride is on a route which is closed to traffic and your biggest danger is being hit from behind by a three year old on a glittery pink trike who’s not watching where she’s going because she’s too busy asking her dad for a bell “just like that lady’s bicycle please.” Why, exactly, do we need to dress up in more hi-viz than a parking attendants’ convention?

Close some of the roads to traffic for one day a year, and say “look, we had 50,000 come on the Skyride.” How many of those 50,000 people were (1) already cycling in London (2) start cycling in London and keep it up past their first punishment pass or encounter with Aldgate Gyratory?

The vehicular cyclists, those people who, like our Mayor, are happy to take their place in traffic and cycle round Elephant and Castle roundabout “with their wits about them,” are mostly already cycling. The grand gestures don’t affect them.

The people who want to cycle but are put off by the prospect of jousting with buses down the Mile End Road are affected by the grand gestures, because they take one look at the cycle Superdeathways and think “I’m not cycling in that, it’s not safe.”

£2million per mile of blue paint completely wasted because it doesn’t make its users either subjectively or objectively safer. At one end, Cycle Superdeathway 2 abandons you before the Aldgate Gyratory instead of leading you safely round it, and at the other it leads you into the most dangerous spot at the roundabout and then disappears with a metaphorical cry of “sorry mate, you’re on your own.”

I’m sick of my money being wasted on grand gestures. I’ve joined Londoners on Bikes and I will be asking pointed questions about what the mayoral candidates will be doing in order to make cycling in London objectively saf