Illogically illegal and an illogical coroner

Fatima Abukar died earlier this year while riding an e-scooter.

This is what the investigation found:

Here is what Green Street looks like

A typical busy shopping street that is awful to use on two wheels. Most of the drivers of those motor vehicles are not there to shop, but to go somewhere else from somewhere else. In other words they are intruders: they bring noise, pollution and death. People have been brainwashed in accepting this as normal.

One of the zombies is Graeme Irvine, senior coroner in east London. He was obviously distressed by the killing of a 14 year old. However, instead of pointing the finger at the intruders, at the people who bring death to the street, he claims that the preventable cause of the collision was the e-scooter.

Without any grasp of statistics, Irvine noticed a correlation between Police enforcement action against e-scooter riders and number of deaths

E-scooters have been acknowledged as a useful arm of the micromobility revolution that will make our cities more liveable. That is why most European cities have successful hire schemes. The only reason why a citizen cannot ride one’s own legally purchased e-scooter in England is that authorities are too lazy to change illogical regulations. If e-hire scooters are deemed safe, why shouldn’t private ones be, if properly vetted?

So Irvine has written a non-sensical Prevention of Future Deaths report to:

basically saying that e-scooters are a problem, not a solution.

When will these people accept that motor vehicles in busy shopping streets are THE problem?

Police officer who caused crash where two people died cleared by Jury

One afternoon in 2016, two police officers were driving in Penge, South London, when they identified a stolen Ford Focus in front of them. The Police driver activated his lights and sirens but the driver of the stolen car chose not to stop and accelerated in a dangerous manner.

What happened next was a mad chase with speeds over 100kph in residential roads, through red lights and driving the wrong way down one way streets. It could only end badly, and tragically it did end: the car thief lost control and killed two people.

Before the chase the thief posed no threat to members of the public; it was clearly the irresponsible action of the police officers which caused the crash. The chase lasted 6 minutes, over 6 km. Any professional driver would have been in no doubt that the chase was extremely dangerous and that the danger created by the chase was totally disproportionate to the threat that the thief constituted before the fateful encounter.

It is difficult to understand how anyone could argue that the police driver and his companion are not guilty of causing the death of two innocent people. Indeed one year after the crash, the Independent Police Complaints Commission sent the folder of its investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service. The latter decided to drop the charges against the navigator (even though there is no evidence he tried to stop his companion) but went ahead prosecuting the driver

Interestingly, following the incident, the Police Federation started to lobby for a licence to kill:

The Police Federation has held several meetings with ministers over the proposal to exempt pursuit drivers from prosecution for dangerous or careless driving – providing they have followed their training.

The car thief was duly convicted of two counts of manslaughter by gross negligence and one count of causing serious injury by dangerous driving.

Six years after the crash, the case against the police driver finally came to court

The Prosecutor case:

“On any sensible analysis the risk posed by the pursuit, taking account of the driving of both vehicles, was at a higher level of risk,

“PC Welch engaged in a chase where to do so was inappropriate, and, more importantly, persisted in that chase when it should have been clear that this was disproportionate and posed a clear risk to other road users and pedestrians.

“This was not a police officer heading to an emergency, let alone an emergency involving a risk to life.

“Rather, all he wanted to do was to speak to the driver.”

The jury disagreed and acquitted the police officer

Yet another case that shows that road crime should not be tried by jury.

Victims are not just numbers

Everytime a TfL manager or the Mayor is asked to comment on a road crash that resulted in the death of a citizen walking and cycling, they parrot the same refrain “Every death on London’s streets is one too many” (see for example here)

It has become formulaic and therefore insulting to the families of the victims, because they know that there is no belief behind those words.

Therefore, as thirtyfour of our fellow citizens have so far been killed this year, while walking or cycling in London, we reproduce this moving speech by the mother of a young victim, by kind permission of RoadPeace, where it was first published

I wanted to start by saying a little about my daughter Anisha because I feel she has often been absent from the whole legal process that we have been caught up in for so long and a road death is, after all, about someone losing their life.

Anisha was 20 and in her first year studying philosophy and Spanish at King’s College. She was a beautiful person in every single way. She has three siblings and she was, although not in any bossy sense, the leader of the team. Everything she loved we all loved because her enthusiasm for it was overwhelming. She was incredibly witty and smart with a broad knowledge of culture. She was not fussy in what she read or watched or listened to – from cartoons to obscure Italian 1960s art movies. She absorbed it all. She did one philosophy essay on whether the Sugababes are still the Sugababes if none of the original members are in the band. She always looked for the best in people. She went out of her way to make people feel better about themselves. Her boss at the cafe where she worked remarked that she was ‘effortlessly adorable’. Her little brother Gael wrote: “Anisha is a truly spectacular person. She’s smart, funny and caring. She’s always there for you and never won’t be. She is loved no matter what. Her love is endless. She is an immortal, and that’s what she deserves.”

On 19th February 2020 Anisha, her boyfriend Rory and his friend Liam arrived at Brixton tube station having met up in central London. They got on the bus on their way to a club and then got off to get some money from the cashpoint on Brixton Hill. Anisha had got to the middle of the road when a car came out of nowhere driving at great speed on both sides of the road and through two red lights. She tried to jump back, but the car swerved into her. She died instantly. The driver did not stop. He only handed himself in 48 hours later after speaking to his father – a barrister – and after the police went to his and his father’s house, thus avoiding a test for alcohol or drugs [he had a previous conviction for driving under the influence of drugs]. 

He pleaded guilty – he was caught on CCTV so what else could he do? – and immediately got a third off his sentence for doing so and saving court time. Twice he refused to leave his cell to come to court to be sentenced and was sentenced in absentia with only us in court to witness it. Both Rory and I had written impact statements to read in court – to read to him so that he understood the impact of his actions and who Anisha was. That for me was a major part of his sentence. 

He got 10.5 years – the maximum sentence for death by dangerous driving is 14 years [one asks how much more dangerous one needs to drive to get the full sentence – he could have killed several people. Anisha’s boyfriend and friend could have easily been killed as well. The driver was heading down to the busy Brixton tube station]. He will be out next year. He applied to be moved to an open prison around six months after he was sentenced, which is where he is now. The law is being changed to allow for a life sentence, but, as we have seen, one thing is the law; another is its implementation.

It transpired that the driver had been flagged by an unmarked police car moments before he hit Anisha because he had been driving dangerously for some time beforehand. He slowed down, but then when a gap opened in the traffic he took off. So we had to wait a year for an independent police report which was basically a long debate on the difference between the words pursue and follow. Because he was sentenced and there was an independent police report we were told by the coroner’s office – and only when I asked for an update a year later – that the inquest had been closed. Nothing more could be learned from her death.

I have spent the last two years writing impact statement after impact statement to find out exactly what happened, given the sentencing was short and bizarre with the person who killed her not even there. As a mother, I had to know – it was the last thing I could do for Anisha – and I wanted to see if there was anything that could be done to stop such crimes happening again.

I now know that stretch of road has been the site of several serious accidents in the last five years, including at least one other fatal one. In my imagination I thought the road was a wide one. In fact, it is just two lanes. Anisha was seconds from safety. 

And yet, it was as if no one cared to look at what could be learned from what happened. After going through traffic campaign groups, I contacted the local council and after several months found that there had been a meeting with councillors, the police and the coroner to decide that the accident was such a criminal act that effectively nothing could be learned from it. No-one bothered to tell us about this meeting. In fact, the coroner, when he told us that the case was closed, said ‘you may know that the driver has been sentenced’ as if we would not even care enough about what happened to Anisha to follow it up. Since then I have visited the police station in Catford – in March this year – to see the files and understand a bit more about what happened in the absence of an inquest. I had to instigate all of this.

And that is why I am here today because if there is anything I can do to stop this happening to one other family I will do it. The impact of Anisha’s death will last all of our lives and beyond. Death by dangerous driving is hugely traumatic, which is something that organisations like Road Peace are so good at acknowledging. Their role is absolutely vital. It is as if I am reliving every day the trauma of that moment. I wake up suddenly, violently, hearing the sound of knocking on the door even two years on. Our children are going through this too in their own ways. Yet there is very little – if any – recognition of this legally. There is so much that is wrong with the justice system in this country – the laws are outdated, the process is a game in which the victim’s family is a bystander, the victim’s family is forced to make endless impact statements and to relive things constantly. It is a form of mental torture and it makes things worse, if that is possible. 

It is the cumulative effect of it all that is so damaging and so exhausting and I don’t think that is acknowledged in any way. I hope I can in some small way highlight the terrible and ongoing impact of road deaths and the inadequate way we as a society currently respond. Surely it make sense to get everyone involved together to work on prevention and who has more of an interest than the victim’s family? We may have lost the person we loved, but we surely don’t want it to happen to anyone else. Yet all too often it seems that we are excluded and have to fight a system that doesn’t recognise us all on our own. I hope that events like this are a start to including the voices of victim’s families more.”

Island of Death

On 29th October 2019, Lukasz Binkowski was killed, crushed by the wheels of a lorry on the South Circular in Catford.

At the inquest the incident was described in a way that puts all the blame on the victim, who was unable to put forward his version.

Lukasz Binkowski had been cycling on a grey mountain bike to Camberwell, where he worked as a driver at a cleaning products company. Shortly before 6:30am, the lorry had safely overtaken him with “good clearance”, before moving back into the left lane near Ravensbourne Park.

However, as the traffic was brought to a stop for 11 seconds due to a red traffic light near Catford station, Lukasz cycled along the near side of the lorry. Being in the space between the pavement and the vehicle, he appeared to onlookers to have lost his balance after the lorry started to move forward, and fell underneath the rear wheels.

The lorry had warning signs on its rears and although the exact mechanism is uncertain, it was at this point that Mr Binkowski either lost his balance or was caught by the forward movement of the lorry, being caught by the wheels and sustaining his unsurvivable injuries.”

The truth is much more nuanced than that, as anyone who spends fifteen minutes at the junction, can easily understand.

The South Circular is very narrow in many stretches, and this is one of them. Riding West, the road meets a Y-junction with the South Circular veering right.

For someone riding a bike there are only two bad options when the carriage way splits into two lanes:

a. ride on the right lane for 200 meters

b. ride on the left lane and near the junction switch to the right lane

The second option is the one that feels safer at the outset (i.e. when one has to decide); but of course is more dangerous near the junction.

Moreover, if the traffic lights at the junction are red, the rider has a difficult decision of where to wait: there is no Advance Stop Line and there is no space to filter through to wait in front of the first vehicle.

There is a small striped area at the cleave of the Y. The critical issue is that it is quite narrow, and it is often driven over by buses and large vehicles driving left, as below.

The natural response is to wait as right as possible. In other words, to avoid being run over by moving vehicles from behind, one is tempted to stay as close as prudent to stationary vehicles on the right.

This is what Lukasz did and it proved fatal.

The lorry to Lukasz’s right moved and he was dragged under its wheels.

In the dysfunctional system we have, Lukasz’s death is “an unfortunate accident”. No lessons have been learned and nothing will be done to fix this death trap.

Of course the reason is that it is difficult to fix. Mixing lorries and bicycles on narrow arterial roads is completely antithetical to Vision Zero. Probably the best solution is to transfer cycle traffic to an alternative high quality route

In a country where leaders were honest, the Mayor would set up a system which learns from tragedies such as the killing of Lukasz and builds safe infrastructure for active travel. But we don’t live in such a country.

Another Londoner has died because TfL was unwilling to put safety above drivers’convenience

Residents have been complaining for years about the lack of safe crossing of Cheyne Walk at the North end of Battersea Bridge.

Here is the junction. There are no pedestrian signals. Citizens have to contend with heavy traffic, with many vehicles turning at the junction in all directions.

And there are no safe places to cross nearby, in either direction.

In January 2017, the Principal Traffic Engineer at Kensington & Chelsea wrote to TfL asking about the progress in plans to build a safe pedestrian crossing at this junction:

Transport for London responded “The model says no”. However they promised that controlled pedestrian signals would be built within 15 months.

It turned out to be another broken promise. Nothing was done. In the three years after the above exchange at least ten Londoners were injured while walking or cycling at this junction.

In June 2019 K&C’s Chief Policy Officer asked for an update. TfL was still looking at tweaking the design, but the model still said no.

Six months later, still no progress. Transport for London was then using the tried-and-tested diversionary tactic or promising a big scheme for the area, which meant more delay in putting a simple pedestrian signal at the junction.

Two months later London went into lockdown and all major street work was stopped. In November 2020, an internal email at K&C, mentions the hope that “funding for this project be unfrozen”, but it is not clear whether the model had said yes to any design

On 12th January 2021, Jack Ryan was killed by a SUV driver while crossing the southern arm of the junction.

Now Transport for London had a corpse and the model switched to yes.

A month later TfL announced that a pedestrian signal will be installed, but only on the southern arm of the junction (where Jack Ryan was killed).

What about a safe crossing of Cheyne Walk or Beaufort Street, which are just as dangerous as the southern arm? TfL kicked again the can to the long grass:

After the a new crossing over the southern arm of the junction is installed, we propose adding two more pedestrian crossings on Cheyne Walk (the junction’s western arm) and Beaufort Street (the junction’s northern arm).

We will continue to work with Kensington and Chelsea Council and other stakeholders to agree these plans and will hold a full public consultation on them later in 2021.

We will revisit this post at the end of the year, to see if TfL has kept this promise.

I leave you with this quote from Rob McGibbon who had organised a petition that attracted 25,000 signatures

“Whilst the new crossing is good news, it is deeply saddening and wrong that it took Jack Ryan’s tragic death to galvanise action. I did not know him, but it is clear that Jack was a hugely popular man, who was dearly loved by his family and so many friends.”

TfL’s lazy approach to remove dangerous signals costs lives

In the past three years, two people have been killed as a direct result of the design fault inherent in Pelican crossings.

Daniela Raczkowska was killed by a lorry driver in Knightsbridge on 18 January 2018, as she was crossing on a green light. Read here how the coroner blamed her for the failures of a broken system.

These pedestrian signals are a symbol of the nastyness of the English class system: pedestrians are considered second class people and a system was designed to ensure that first class people driving vehicles would not be overly inconvenienced by the second class people crossing the street. While the pedestrian is still crossing the street (and indeed has a green signal), the motorist is allowed to drive ahead, by showing him/her flashing amber lights

[Incidentally this is an example of conflict between signals, which we are constantly told by English traffic experts is not allowed in this country, as an excuse for not adapting the universal system of green pedestrian lights in the same direction of green vehicular traffic]

The Pelican design is particularly dangerous on wide roads with two or more lanes in each direction. A pedestrian may be crossing the first lane, where a large vehicle may have stopped to let her cross; this may obstruct the view of the driver of another vehicle on the second lane, who can interpret the flashing amber lights as a signal to proceed, and thus crash into the emerging pedestrian.

The Department for Transport removed pelican crossings from their list of approved designs for signalised crossings in 2016. The last pelican crossing to be installed on TfL’s road network was in January 2012. Some London boroughs continued to choose pelicans as the design for crossings on their roads. The last new pelican site was installed in February 2015 by London Borough of Barnet. Additionally, there are several crossings which had already been programmed before the January 2012 cut off date which is why they have an installation date of after January 2012.

There are still 847 pelican crossings in London, 167 of which are directly managed by Transport for London and the rest by the Boroughs.

Through Caroline Russell, we asked the Mayor how quickly he is planning to remove these death traps. Here is his response:

London has a legacy of pelican crossings which are gradually being replaced through various investment and modernisation programmes. TfL will be upgrading at least 40 in 2020/21, not including those that are part of wider TfL investment projects or borough schemes.
TfL takes a risk-based approach to the prioritisation of investment funding, and its Vision Zero policy places a high priority on improving locations on the road network where risk is highest.

Of course the Mayor, in typical English amateurism, does not explain how he assesses where “risk is highest”. We know that his poodle Will Norman, when he started in his post, wasted a lot of time and money producing a report linking danger with black spots with high KSIs and then packaged this discredited analysis with the name of “evidence based approached”

So we can only assume that Sadiq Khan is waiting for people to be killed before removing pelican crossings. That is NOT a Vision Zero approach.

But we know that #VisionZeroLDN has nothing to do with Vision Zero. It is a hypocritical, amateurish exercise that is failing. Last month Transport for London finally released the KSIs for 2019, which showed a 26% INCREASE in pedestrian fatalities.

Daniela Raczkowska survived Nazi horrors during the Second World War but she was killed by English nastiness and laziness.

UPDATE: A further Question to the Mayor has revealed the future plans by TfL to remove these lethal signals:

• Question
  • Thank you for your response to my question 2020/1012 on the modernisation of pelican crossings. Given that pelican crossings are no longer approved in the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions (TSRGD), how are your prioritising their modernisation, and when will they all be replaced?
• Answer
  • As set out in my earlier response, Transport for London (TfL) takes a risk-based approach to modernising its traffic infrastructure, prioritising locations that present the highest risk to the public. TfL’s risk criteria includes, but is not exclusive to, the age of the equipment, the obsolescence of the equipment, the critical failure rate and associated risk of the equipment to the general public. As of April this year, TfL has 847 pelican crossings within London, out of around 5,000 sets of traffic signals.
  • Crossings make up 55 per cent of the total number of sites being modernised, of which half are Pelican crossings. As such, replacing Pelican crossings is a high priority for TfL.
  • Given its current financial position and the ‘safe stop’ period during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, TfL has had to reassess the number of sites it can modernise this year.  Initially it planned to upgrade 40 Pelican crossings this year, but has had to revise this to 22 upgrades. Replacing aging and higher risk infrastructure is key to Vision Zero, and TfL expects to replace a further 60 Pelican crossings in the next financial year to ensure the overall programme remains on track.

In other words, TfL plans to remove half of the pelican crossings on its roads by April 2022. No words about the hundreds of pelicans on Councils roads (“It is someone else’s job”)

Gareth Powell is in contempt of court

Gareth Powell is Managing Director of Surface Transport at Transport for London.

On 25th July 2018 (nearly two years ago) he wrote a letter (pdf) to the Assistant Coroner of the Inner West London Coroner’s Court, to explain what Transport for London was going to do to prevent a repeat of the avoidable killing of Lucia Ciccioli on Lavander Hill in October 2016.

Lucia was killed by a lorry driver who was talking on his mobile phone at the time.

Here is a media clips gallery and here is RoadPeace report of the Inquest

The junction’s poor design was in the Coroner’s view a major contributory factor to the tragedy and TfL was summoned to explain what they would be doing to fix the dangerous design that forces people riding bicycles to merge in front of motor vehicles.

Specifically the Coroner wrote:

The narrow aspect of Lavander Hill immediately past the junction places cyclists in a vulnerable position when they arrive in Lavender Hill from the Junction. There is no cycle lane provision in Lavender Hill immediately after the junction.

Graphically this is the problem:

In his response to the Coroner, Gareth Powell outlined the solution: reduce the number of motor lanes from two to one before the junction and design a cycle lane before and after the junction. It is really not a difficult intervention.

However, in typical TfL fashion, Powell didn’t seem concerned about the urgency of fixing this death trap. He said that it would take 18 months (!!!) to prepare the revised design; a consultation would follow, and construction “could begin in 2020”.

So December 2019 was the promised deadline to show the new design. However December came and went and no announcement was made. We wrote to Stuart Reid, Head of Vision Zero at TfL, asking to see the plans but received no reply. We chased him twice and still no information; so we issued a FOIA request and TfL tried to weasel out citing Covid. We pressed them and finally got the answer:

We do not hold the information you have requested. We continue to work on the design of the junction which, despite our best endeavours, we were unable to complete at the end of last year. The design we are currently working on will be modelled to consider the impact upon things such as bus journey times and the needs of pedestrians in the area. However, under the current circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, this work has been delayed. Any final design will be subject to consultation.

Did Gareth Powell write to the Coroner apologising for breaking his promise? Did he write to the family of Lucia Ciccioli to apologise that he has not done what he promised to do?

We doubt it. Powell is taking advantage of a broken system. The Coroner issues a request to fix a life-threatening situation but has no power (and/or interest) to follow up; so the relevant authority plays the game: writes a letter with empty promises and then ignores them.

This is England: systems designed to fail so that the elites cannot be taken to account. A fantastically corrupt nation in denial.

Tale of three junctions – Part 2: Deptford Broadway

This is a classic Vision Zero case:

• a design, safe on paper, actually had a fatal flaw
• when someone actually was killed as a consequence of the flaw, no proper investigation took place
• Vision Zero London went to investigate and detected the fatal flaw
• we are now waiting for the flaw to be corrected, but how long will it take? The last words we heard: “This will not be immediate”

In the afternoon of Sunday 16th September 2018 Julia Luxmoore Peto had gone shopping in Deptford. Just before 17:00 she was at the large junction between New Cross Road and Deptford Church Street.

Until a few years ago, this enormous, extremely busy junction had no protected pedestrian crossing; Transport for London eventually placed signaled crossings on three arms of the junction. However the design had a fatal flaw, not immediately apparent from the drawings, but indisputable to anyone who spends fifteen minutes at the junction.

Julia’s intended path had three stages:

1. An unprotected crossing of the slip road for traffic turning left
2. A signaled crossing of three lanes of traffic coming from West: two going straight and one turning right
3. A third crossing (signaled) of the westbound traffic.

The phasing of the motor traffic of the second crossing is a. straight only, b. straight and right turn, c. right turn only. Naturally the pedestrian light shows red during the three phases. However 90% of the traffic goes straight, and after the second phase, when it stops, it gives the misleading impression that it is now safe to cross.

For someone crossing North to South, this false signal is augmented by the fact that often the traffic stopped at red consists of lorries, which obscure the third lane.

It seems safe to cross. But beware of the third lane!

In the picture above, the lady may forget that the third lane is still on green. Adding to this confusion is the geometry of the staggered crossing, a dog left, which leads people to look away from the potential danger coming from the right.

Julia crossed the third lane as a bus approached; she was hit and died in hospital the following day.

At the inquest, the Coroner issued a Prevention of Future Deaths report to Chris Grayling concerning the issue that the signal of the second stage of a staggered pedestrian crossing may confuse people crossing the first stage. This is obviously an important point, but it is unlikely to be the contributory factor of the fatal crash here.

The PFD notes that, following the crash, TfL had installed louvres on the pedestrian lights to obviate the problem cited by the Coroner. We alerted TfL’s Vision Zero team that that measure was insufficient because the real problem was elsewhere, namely in the confusion created by the hidden third lane. That was the fatal fault in the design that killed Julia. We arranged for TfL’s Vision Zero team to view the site and they agreed with our analysis.

At the site visit, a number of solutions were discussed. For instance the staggered crossing can be redesigned so that it is dog right, so that the attention of pedestrians is drawn towards and not away from danger. We wait to know what TfL will implement.

We also pointed out that the crossing of the slip road should have a zebra:

Is it appropriate for an 8 year old or an 80 year old to risk their lives here?

Finally, we suspect that there are many junctions with a similar flaw. We strongly urge Transport for London to review all their junctions if it is the case.

Julia was only 27 when she was killed; she was training to become a speech therapist. This is how her father remembers her:

“She loved her friends, the children she worked with, and her family. She had lots of friends and they were very important to her.She wanted to work with people and help people. She had travelled to lots of different parts of the world, including working at an orphanage in Mongolia during her gap year. She believed in social justice and she was a feminist, and she believed in supporting people who were less fortunate than herself. She would have made a cracking speech and language therapist.”

She was killed as a consequence of a faulty design.

Let the image of this wonderful young woman be a constant reminder to everyone at TfL that the way they design roads may have tragic consequences; it requires constant supervision whether people use the facilities the way they were drawn on paper. Humans are not robots: they are fallible and don’t like to waste their time. Good design takes the humanity of users into consideration and creates systems where attention is directed towards what matters.

 

The banality of the killing fields

With credit to Hannah Arendt

On Saturday 31 August, Pat went to his favourite pub, the Molly Bloom on Kingsland Road in Dalston, for his regular lunchtime pint. At 13:00, he left the pub heading back home; Pat, 69 was the victim of a stroke a few years ago and one side of his body had limited mobility. As a consequence he used a crutch to walk. He was also in the habit of pushing a wheel chair, in case he got tired and needed a rest.

He started crossing Kingsland Road but never made it to the other side. A lorry driver didn’t see him and killed him.

The crash is under investigation; we don’t know how the driver, on a Roman-like road without a bend for several kilometres, failed to see a disabled man pushing a wheel chair crossing the road right in front of him.

We talked to some of the publicans at the Molly and the quotes sounded familiar but were nevertheless shocking:

“He stepped out without looking; it was his habit; we kept on telling him not to do it, but he would not listen; he always used to come out of the pub with his wheelchair and just start crossing the road. Like he didn’t care.”

“But how did the driver not see him?”

“I don’t know; I was inside, I didn’t see it. The driver could have been looking right or left”

“But should he not be looking ahead of him?”

Shrug of shoulders. “It is very sad, but he always did that: just crossed the road looking ahead; he didn’t care”

Maybe Pat didn’t care, or maybe he did; maybe he cared to show that he did not want to be cowed into submission by a culture that made him second class, not because of his disabilities, but because he could not or did not want to drive.

I left the pub asking myself: how could these people, who have spent many hours together with Pat, blame him for being killed? The answer is well known: they have been brainwashed by a society that instills in all citizens the concept that roads are designed for people who drive; people walking and cycling are lower class and must defer to the powerful drivers. Pat challenged the powerful and he was rightly killed.

This fascist attitude has been inculcated in people’s mind for decades, most notably by the Government’s Think! campaign, a poster child for victim blaming.

Outside the pub, a few metres south, half of the pavement and half the carriageway was cordoned off for repairs. The people working at the site had parked their van on a double red line in a way that obscured the view to anyone wishing to cross the road; and many people were doing just that.

I approached the manager of the team and pointed out the danger of their van.

“We have to park it somewhere”

“I understand but the way you have parked it, it is creating a visual obstruction for people who want to cross.”

“They should not be crossing here. There is a signaled crossing 100m up the road.”

“But people do cross here because they want to get to the station. A pensioner was killed at this very spot”

“Yes, but he was disabled”

“So disabled people who cross the road deserve to die?”

“No, but he shouldn’t have crossed here, it is not legal”

“Excuse me, but where does it say that it is illegal to cross the road here?”

“Well, we have to park it somewhere” We were entering a loop.

Difficult to reason with people who have been zombified. We tweeted the image above, pointing out the danger, and thankfully the Mayor of Hackney promised to raise the issue with TfL. The next day, the van was parked elsewhere.

This fascist mindset is also prevalent among the Council Officers to whom Glanville should be providing guidance. Take our request to put two zebra crossings on Lee St, a rat run just one kilometre south of the fatal collision. One would be in front of Haggerston Overground Station, and the second at the entrance of a local park which every afternoon teems with children; the gate is at a dangerous T-junction with unpredictable vehicular movements.

One would think that officers would judge whether citizens safety would be improved by these zebra crossings.

Wrong! The priority for the Hackney Officers is to limit the inconvenience to people who choose to drive, i.e. the people who choose to poison and endanger the children playing in the park and the citizens who use public transport. Here is the response we have received from Andy Cunningham, Head of Streetscene at Hackney Council:

In other words the Council adopts some form of mathematical bullshit, and tells us that the zebras are not justified. Officers have spent considerable time and money to measure traffic data, and plugged it in a formula designed to say No.

If the officers had not been zombified, they would have spent thirty minutes at 16:00 at the gate of the park and they would have realised that the crossing is hazardous especially given the high number of young children using it, the volume of drivers using the road as a rat run and the difficulty in predicting turns at the junction.

If the officers had not been zombified, they would understand the fascist nature of their decision process: provision of safety to ordinary citizens has to surpass an impossible hurdle in order not to inconvenience the chosen race: motorists.

But this is the essence of the Banality of Evil: people just doing their job, their mind impregnated by an evil meme, namely that drivers are more important citizens.

We hope that the Mayor of Hackney understands the importance of his role and starts to cleanse the officers from this evil ideology, and understands that people like Pat don’t deserve to die just because they choose to cross the road where it is convenient to them and not where it is convenient to those who poison us.

 

Tale of three junctions – Part 1: King William Street

Three junctions, where people have lost their lives or severely injured, and the wrong lessons have been learned.

Part 1: King William Street

This is probably the most dangerous junction for pedestrians in the City of London. It is on TfL’s list of 73 killer junctions and apparently TfL is designing a new layout (we have not seen any plans yet). I have raised the lethality of the junction with the City of London Road Safety team more than two years ago, but they claim it is TfL’s responsibility.

It would have been kept in the back burner for years, if it had not suddenly sprung in the news, following a court decision adjudicating costs on a collision between Robert Hazeldean who crashed into Gemma Brushet while riding his bike.

However, as is usually the case in England, the wrong lessons were learned. Nobody has focused on the junction and people have tittle-tattled on the judge’s decision to ask Hazeldean to pay for Brushet’s cost even if blame was apportioned 50-50.

Even shabbier has been the behaviour of organisations such as British Cycling and London Cycling Campaign which used the opportunity to market their memberships with inclusive 3rd party insurance.

No one has spoken about the junction, the root of the problem.

The key lethal feature of this crossing is that one arm has ALWAYS conflicting motor traffic. That is right: there is no phase when it is safe to cross.

View from North

View from South – Traffic stopped at red – but it is NOT safe to cross

To make things even worse, the Southbound motor traffic is most of the time stationary, thus giving a deceptive clue that it is safe to cross.

Add to this mix the English arrogance that who sits at a wheel (or rides a bike) has always priority over pedestrians and you have a death trap.

Now watch this two minute video, and you scratch your head: how can a civilised country design and refuse to alter something so dangerous and disrespectful to its citizens?

Notice from the beginning: motor traffic stopped at red, but West arm is not safe to cross.

00:35 Watch the speed of the bus – if a pedestrian had been confused and was crossing at that point, the driver would have had no chance to take evasive action -> death with 80% probability (and the pedestrian would have been blamed)

00:55 People crossing are given no clues that southbound traffic has now a green light and are taken aback.

01:05 Eight people squeezed between buses. Why do English people accept being treated with such contempt?

01:25 Pedestrians unsure about oncoming cyclists

The incident that had everyone fibrillating happened in 2015; in 2017 there was another incident where a pedestrian suffered serious injuries. We are now well in the second half of 2019 and TfL is still designing. They are in contempt of Section 39 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, which compels the relevant Transport Authority to take action when road design has contributed to serious incidents, to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Our solution is simple: get rid of the traffic light and put a zebra crossing. It should not take two years to do that.

UPDATE 12.08.19 – As Robert points out in the comment below, motor traffic is forbidden from turning left from Cannon Street. So the green arrow from the West is not a legal traffic flow. However if one is crossing King William Street, one may not be aware of this prohibition and one’s attention may be split three ways.