‘bikes alive’ action at kings x tomorrow

8th Jan­u­ary 2012

In the absence of any timetable or gen­uine will­ing­ness from either the may­or or trans­port for lon­don (tfl), bicy­cle activists will stage the first of sev­er­al direct actions tomor­row evening at king’s cross road junc­tions.

cyclists and sup­port­ers are expect­ed to arrive in large num­bers for tomor­row evening’s ‘crit­i­cal mass’ style block­ade at king’s cross in protest at the large num­bers of cyclist fatal­i­ties at the junc­tion and at tfl and the may­or’s ret­i­cence to do any­thing about it.

tomor­row’s action, which will last an hour from 6pm, fol­lows on from a recent vig­il, pic­tured above, which attract­ed around 100 cyclists and fea­tured speak­ers from the lon­don cycling cam­paign, road peace, lon­don liv­ing streets, and the green par­ty, as well as friends and rel­a­tives of some of those killed.

six­teen cyclists were killed on lon­don roads last year, up from 10 in 2010.

cam­paign­ers are call­ing on tfl to intro­duce dutch-style cycling sys­tems. in dutch cities, cyclists face sta­tis­ti­cal­ly less than half the dan­gers of their lon­don coun­ter­parts, and yet tfl have reject­ed pro­pos­als put for­ward as long ago as 2008, and instead is reduc­ing the num­ber of pedes­tri­an cross­ings to ‘improve traf­fic flow’.

tfl’s grounds for reject­ing junc­tion changes at king’s cross is that they may cause ‘traf­fic delay’.

last year, 24 yr old fash­ion stu­dent ‘deep’ lee was killed by a lor­ry at king’s cross. in decem­ber, after reject­ing safe­ty pro­pos­als at a meet­ing at cam­den town hall, tfl offi­cials asked her boyfriend if they could now remove the flower-cov­ered memo­r­i­al ghost bike. he respond­ed that they should ‘sort out the junc­tion first’.

in response to tfl’s lethar­gy and fail­ures, and in a direct chal­lenge to their con­cerns about ‘traf­fic delays’, bicy­cle activists have called for cyclists and their sup­port­ers to join them at king’s cross at 6pm tomor­row evening and to cycle around the junc­tion en masse at a safe slow speed, per­haps stop­ping every now and then as sheer mass of cycle traf­fic some­times caus­es delays.

this will be the first of sev­er­al reg­u­lar such actions to show tfl that cyclists are fed up of being treat­ed as dis­pos­able cit­i­zens and are enti­tled to pro­tec­tion, safe­ty, and con­sid­er­a­tion in road plan­ning.

for more info and con­tacts for tomor­row’s and future actions, see www.bikesalive.wordpress.com

and for some excel­lent opin­ion pieces and well-researched links, see www.cyclelondoncity.blogspot.com