Leave your bike at a London Station - but hurry

This is the best time of year to leave your bike at a London station. There are fewer bicycle thefts reported to British Transport Police in December than at any other time of the year. But hurry - things start to get worse after Christmas, and by next summer there will be three times as many bikes being reported stolen.

Richmond, Camden, Bromley and Kingston together account for a third of the reports.

The data is here

DfT consultation

I see that the Department for Transport have opened consultation on the Transparency section of their business plan. The information is here. We are not being invited to comment on the content - I assume that consultation has already happened. So leaving aside any issues we might have with the rest of the document, we are invited to comment on whether they:

• have selected the right indicators and measures and clearly explained their meaning in order to give a helpful high-level picture on the spending and performance of the transport sector
• have robust data systems in place to ensure that the information provided is accurate, timely and robust and the quality is fit for purpose
• have clearly defined their commitment to publishing data to help judge performance and whether the data that will be published meets our needs
• should be mandating or encouraging the publication of extra data, or data broken down in a different way, that we would find helpful in holding the transport sector to account or making choices about transport services

I'll take it as a given that the people in DfT really are interested in encouraging sustainable travel, making cycling more attractive and so on. On that basis my first thoughts are:

• Decision taking is going to be at a local level, but the DfT plan is to publish the main indicators at a regional level - shouldn't we expect data at local authority level on the proportion of cycling trips to presented in a consistent format so that we can compare how different local authorities are performing?
• Numbers are pretty useless in isolation - there are too many other factors to explain any differences and confuse the issues. Shouldn't we expect at least some baseline data for each local authority, so that we can see future trends
• Measuring the number of urban trips under 5 miles strikes me as a fairly useful proxy for measuring progress. It's particularly relevant for large towns and cities. But any single target is potentially going to distort behaviour. What about additional measures for local authorities that choose to prioritise other forms of cycling (sport, or tourism); or particular groups (school-children, commuters, rail users) 
• What this is seeking is behavioural change across large numbers of road users. That takes time. I imagine that even the most effective local initiatives will show little impact on outcomes in the first couple of years. The suggested indicators are "lagging" in the way they measure any impact. It's no good looking back in four years time and saying "well that didn't work then". Effective scrutiny will have to rely on  leading indicators, to see what our local representatives are up to, and whether things are heading in the right direction. If individual local authorities are bombarded with FOIA requests it will waste a lot of their time.  Local authorities themselves will need more detail to monitor and steer their local initiatives. So it would be good to see some consistent standard measures for each local authority of things like the level of investment in cycling infrastructure, what local goals and targets have been set, the types of initiative that are taking place, and the number of participants in schemes such as training for cyclists
• Is DfT providing any guidelines to local authorities on how to track progress and how to ensure measurements are consistent between authorities - and if so, what are they. 
• Finally (and I'm not sure if this fits the consultation criteria or not), I've not seen anything on how proposals for the sustainable transport fund are going to be evaluated - how can we participate  without knowing this?

I don't have any experience of this kind of thing. Maybe others do, and maybe they are already involved. What is the best way to be heard? Have I missed anything? Am I wasting my time even thinking about it?

If we had no rules where would we be?

Our local council has posted an item on their web site about a campaign by community wardens and police community support officers to discourage cycling in pedestrian areas around the town centre. Apparently in one week of November they issued five fixed penalty notices and "educated" four young people about the dangers of cycling in a pedestrian area.

My reaction to this is a bit mixed.

On the one hand:

I don't like to see cyclists riding on the pavement. Most of those I see doing it are young men, who are big enough to handle traffic, don't always take much care around pedestrians, and ought to know better. I can see why it worries the more elderly or parents with young children. I know it would be better for both cyclists and pedestrians if more cyclists were on the road and fewer on the pavement.

On the other hand:

There are situations where I can understand why people ride on the pavement. There are busy roads, and dodgy drivers around. I've recently learned the hard way just how vulnerable cyclists can be in traffic. So I have some sympathy with people who sometimes feel safer on the pavement than on the road.

For me the bigger issue is finding my way around a jumble of pedestrian areas and access roads in the town centre. Traffic is taken around a tortuous one-way system, and there are only a few clear cycle routes. I can easily find my way around the centre on foot but I don't often ride through it, so I don't always have a clear idea of the best way to navigate from A to B. As a result I admit to sometimes riding on pedestrian areas - just because it's easiest.

I don't want an FPN, so in future I'll have to be more clear where we are allowed to ride, and where we are not. I'll end up avoiding some of the more difficult parts of the centre.

Basically I think what I'm saying is that I approve of what they are doing to stop others cycling on the pavement. I'll do my bit, but it's all a bit of a pain and I wish the rules didn't apply to me.

They say their campaign has been a success, and I suppose this means they are right as far as I am concerned. But if I forget, make a mistake, or end up bending the rules for some reason, I hope they handle it sensibly. So far that seems to be how it is. Each day of the week's campaign they issued less than one FPN and educated less than one cyclist. That doesn't sound as though the enforcement has been too vigorous so far. Either they are being very reasonable, or there wasn't much of a problem in the first place.

Snowless

Sunday evening is when we get most updates about how the rest of the family is doing. With various relatives scattered around the country it sounds as though we are the just about the only ones who are not experiencing snow at the moment.

No doubt our day will come. For now I can only say that this afternoon's ride was blooming cold. My nose dripped constantly. Normally I proceed at a relaxed and leisurely pace, but today for the last few miles I dropped a gear, and pedalled furiously to warm myself up. When I got home I enjoyed the mug of hot chocolate that I had been dreaming about for a while.

The more important thing is that I've finally revisited the roundabout on the A4 where I was knocked off the bike a few weeks back.

I've been avoiding this for a while, by routing around. The A4 isn't a great road to ride on, but it joins up a lot of my other routes, and avoiding one junction was getting a bit silly. Naturally there was no problem today - on a Sunday afternoon with little traffic. So I decided to continue along it for a few more miles and a few more roundabouts. I wanted to prove that I was far too sensible to be troubled by one bump, and that I could easily  overcome any anxieties that I might have imagined. It worked. I am convinced. Really.

War memorials

It was a bit of a cold morning but I managed a ride of about 20 miles around familiar lanes. It's now a couple of weeks after Remembrance Day, but I went with the intent of adding some of the local war memorials to Open Street Map.

The one in the picture is on the edge of Waltham St Lawrence. It commemorates those who died in both world wars, but I suppose it is understandable to associate war memorials mostly with the first. Apparently from this village of around 900 people, 220 served, and 29 died between 1914 and 1918.

It is estimated that 16.5 million people were killed in the first war, of which almost a million were from the UK. Just over one in 50 of the population were killed. So the village of Waltham St Lawrence suffered a bit more than most, but there is nothing really unusual about the number of casualties from this particular parish. There must be a similar number of names on tens of thousands of similar memorials.

The first world war ended a long time ago, but these monuments still show how determined they were at the time that their sacrifice would be remembered. Like many of them, one of the other memorials I visited today is inscribed "lest we forget". When the local MP unveiled this one he described it as “a memorial for all time”.

In many ways I suppose we have succeeded in keeping the memory alive, but I suspect most of us find it hard enough to understand how individuals coped with the impact on their own family. I, for one, cannot begin to imagine the overall magnitude of the slaughter. I find these memorials from a small community very moving. Perhaps that's because they bring something unimaginable down to a scale that I can cope with. But they are also so common and so familiar that I regret to say I normally pass without taking any particular notice. I'm glad that I took a bit of time to search a few out, and to make a point of pausing and reflecting.

The UK National Inventory of War Memorials is here, and the War Memorials Trust is here. The idea of adding war memorials to Open Street Map came from an OSM project of the week here. And I'm hoping that the one in the picture will appear on the map here.

"Things can only get better"

It has not been a great day today, but even the World Database of Happiness recognises that we all share some ups and downs. Their figures look all over the place to me, but to the extent that there is any trend at all, things seems to be heading in the right direction. Slowly. So anyone who wants to survey my level of happiness might be well-advised to wait a while.

What on earth!

From link on Yehuda Moon