Category: London

Ever been stuck with a bicycle with a flat tyre, in London but far from home? This has happened to me, many times, including twice in the last week, thanks to the usual combination of rain, grime and broken glass that seems to be endemic at this time of year here. & I don’t generally carry a spare inner tube, tyre levers and mini-pump.

Normally, I’m just aiming to get the bike home, where the toolset awaits, but how to do that? Full-size bikes are not allowed on buses, Tramlink, or “deep level” (i.e. bored) sections of tube lines – and until recently they weren’t allowed on the DLR either. TfL have this useful map showing where you can take them on their network, but this doesn’t include “heavy” rail lines which are generally more accommodating. Here is an equivalent map, but for First Capital Connect trains only.

So, I’ve modified the combined Rail & Tube Map to get the best of both worlds, and be sure of getting my bike home. Because I’m always looking for the cheapest way to complete such a recovery journey, I’ve included the Zone 1 area, as a place to try and avoid if possible. The orange-coloured London Overground lines then become very useful. I’ve also included, as red dots, a number of the “out-of-station interchanges” which aren’t normally shown on tube or rail maps, but which allow a by-street transfer between lines while counting as the same Oyster card journey. These make, for example, the GOBLIN (Gospel Oak to Barking LINe) a lot more useful, should you find yourself with a broken bike in north or east London, adding six valid connections which are otherwise unmarked on the main maps.

Most striking is the “hole” in central London, only one line passing through the Circle Line’s main loop. The Victoria and Waterloo & City lines are completely gone. A few less useful tube line sections are scattered to the north – I can’t imagine many people have ever taken a bike on a train from Cockfosters to Oakwood, for example. Your Oyster card also won’t get you to Heathrow with a bike – but then you presumably don’t live there anyway. The Central Line terminates just short of Stratford, which is annoying if you are trying to get back from Epping – but an out-of-station interchange at Leytonstone means there is a viable connection after all.

I “fiddled” with the original map in Illustrator – first deleting the banned sections, then rearranging station blobs so that they were connecting with blank space. It should be noted also that, if you end up with a flat tyre and are planning the tube method of recovery, that full-size bikes are banned from pretty much the whole tube network, and most of the rail network, during the weekday rush-hours.

This is a strictly unofficial mashup/modification of the original map which was produced by, and is the copyright of, Transport for London and ATOC. Here is a larger version.

[Update 1: Have added the Dalston OSI as multiple people have asked for it!]

The Bow Roundabout is a busy and unpleasant junction in east London, with large volumes of traffic, including many bicycles and lorries. It forms a key part of the trunk network in London, distributing road-haulage around the city. River channels of the Lea Valley, industrial complexes, and the developing Olympic Park, block suitable alternative cycle routes.

Bicycles generally only want to travel between central London to the SW and Stratford to the NE. Lorries and other motorised traffic generally want to travel in all directions, but because of both a flyunder (NW to/from SE) and a flyover (SW to/from NE) they only need to use the roundabout if wanting to turn right or left. The exception is local bus services between central London and Stratford, which have a bus stop on the approach slip roads.

This fundamental difference in the routes between lorries and other motorists (who are always turning left or right) and cyclists (who are always going straight ahead) has likely been a factor that led to three cycling fatalities in the last year, at least two due to “left hooks” (lorries on a cyclist’s right turning left across them). The junction approaches have been remodelled several times, most recently introducing a traffic-light-controlled advanced stop box for cyclists, to ensure they get to the front of the queue to enter the roundabout. However, the design is non-standard and confusing for cyclists – tellingly there is an official video showing how to use it. The design results in a forest of traffic lights, and the “safe” advance stop box and subsequent cycle lane refuges are too often blocked with motor traffic, stopped by numerous further traffic lights, during busy periods. This video from The Guardian shows this to dramatic effect – skip to 3 minutes in.

The layout is also unpleasant for pedestrians, who have to cross two slip roads, but the first of the pair is uncontrolled – there is no traffic light for them. The junction is still not fit for purpose, but, crucially, redesigns cannot reduce the overall flow of traffic through the junction, as it is at capacity. Diamondgeezer has detailed the problem from a pedestrian’s viewpoint.

Here is the current layout:

Traffic lights are shown as black blobs. The pedestrian crossing points are showing with blue/white squares, and the pedestrian only section is shown as a dashed blue/orange line. To the east of the junction is a water channel, with a “floating towpath” beside it, shown with black dashes as a tunneled section. This route is not considered further here.

Here is my proposal:

Again, black dots are traffic lights, blue squares are crossing points, with an additional two blue squares showing bus stops, moved from the SW and NE slip roads. The road links to these bus stops are accessed only by buses and are shown in yellow. The cycle/pedestrian paths are shown as orange/blue dashed lines.

At first glance it somewhat looks like a roundabout in reverse, but this is not the case – there are four traffic-light-controlled “diamond” crossings, and traffic may only proceed straight across these.

This design improves on pedestrian and cyclist safety by properly segregating them from the road routes. For each direction, pedestrians/cyclists must make two crossings, both at right angles to traffic. At each crossing, there are two single-lane roads to cross, controlled by traffic lights which stop traffic on both roads at the same time, plus at the first crossing there is a bus road link which would be crossed via a raised zebra crossing, due to its low traffic levels.

Traffic negotiating the roundabout and turning left will meet just one traffic light, which would be green for just under 50% of the time. Traffic turning right will meet two traffic lights. Both will be red or both green, at the same time. This means that, again, nearly 50% of the time, traffic turning right would have green lights all the way through. There is no need for a dedicated pedestrian phase, with this design.

The only traffic which would not benefit from this design is the small amount of non-bus traffic travelling to/from the side-roads off the slip-roads to the NE, to/from the SW, and traffic travelling from the MacDonalds in the SW. This traffic would no longer be able to proceed straight across the roundabout to the NE unless it was allowed to use the small bus link-roads.

Disclaimer: I am (obviously) not a professional planner or traffic modeller, I am approaching this problem purely one of many regular cyclists on busy roads in London. Credits: The design was created in the Potlatch 2 editor on OpenStreetMap.org, and includes existing data from OpenStreetMap contributors and background aerial imagery from Bing. If trying this yourself be sure not to save your changes to the OpenStreetMap database. You can see the roundabout on an interactive map.

[Updated] As an update to the London Cycling Census map that I mentioned in the last post, here is a map based on similar data collected by the Department of Transport during 2012. The map covers the whole of London, over 3000 datapoints – in fact the underlying data is available for the major road network across Great Britain.

My earlier work was based on the Transport for London cycle census which was carried out in April this year, covering around 170 locations in central London only, mainly the major road network plus some cycle-specific routes. The DfT dataset is older, and is major roads only, but by covering the whole of London, it puts cycling (and the other modes of transport covered) in context.

By default, the map shows cyclists vs buses vs lorries. You can change any of the three colours to show cars, but these are generally very large values so the arrows for cars tend to dominate the map. Zooming in may improve clarity when this happens.

Looking across London, for initial set of just bikes, buses and lorries, it is striking to see how closely the lorries follow just the trunk road network. Bicycles also dominate the centre of the city, their levels dropping dramatically between inner and outer London.

The work is an output produced while working on the EUNOIA project. It is one of the datasets that the project will use, when calibrating a MATSim-based travel demand model of London, to check that the numbers in the model roughly match those seen in this dataset.

View the visualisation here.
The data comes from here.

[Update: I produced a major update to the map in January 2017 – it now includes data from 2000-2015, includes data on some minor roads, removes the arrows (as they don’t reveal much, for full-day counts), and allows a comparison between years instead of between modes. The data table has also been replaced with an interactive graph.]

I was at the Grant Museum of Zoology, one of UCL’s public museums in Bloomsbury, last week, helping install a new set of iPads for some interactive exhibits in there. The museum a small but fascinating space, it has been around since the 1820s but recently moved into a, larger space, although it still has a lovely old-fashioned feel to it, with display cabinets and drawers full of unusual stuffed or pickled animals, such as the Jar of Moles.

Anyway, I was delighted to finally visit the Micrarium, a new exhibit dedicated to the very small, it consists of three walls crammed full of slides of tiny things, displayed around a booth that you can walk into, with a mirror on the ceiling to complete the effect. While looking at the tiny specimens is an interesting exercise in itself, I was particularly taken with the design. Unlike the rest of the museum, which is mainly made of varnished wood cases and dimly lit for preservation reasons, the Micrarium is strikingly lit and immediately invites closer investigation – you have to get up close and personal with these tiny specimens in order to simply see what they are.

The idea of having a “all around you” booth in a museum reminds me of the “interactive Booth map” at the Museum of London, which I visited shortly after it opened a couple of years back.

The museum and Micrarium are free to visit and are open on weekdays from 1-5pm, located at the junction of Gower Street and University Street (I do love that there is a street with that name in London). If you do manage to visit, take a moment to answer one of the philosophical questions on the iPads, or tweet #GrantQR.

Cross-posted from my leisure blog.