Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1560
- 1579)
1560. MR PECK: I am going to display
another item here which is the report from the Dutch Ministry
of Public Works.[8]
This is similar to what is being proposed in London. It is free
or very cheap heavily subsidised public transport by bicycle.
They provide 100 rental stations at various rail interchanges
across the Netherlands and it is pretty much automated. There
have 200,000 rentals and, as you can see, it costs just about
£2 a day to rent a bike. This is the sort of thing we are
likely to see coming out of the London system in the future.
1561. If we could look at this section, please,
which illustrates another aspect of the Dutch integration, as
you can see 33 per cent of rail travellers get to the station
by bike and the levels of cycle storage at some stations are given,
10,000 bikes at Amsterdam Central Station of storage space and
Utrecht has 17,500 bicycle spaces at the central station.[9]
This is for a town of only a couple of hundred thousand people.
The Netherlands is a different situation, but we are looking at
five per cent mobile share for cycling in London and we should
be preparing our public transport facilities for areas in these
sorts of circumstances.
1562. One other thing I would like to point
out, going back to page five very quickly, is that both the BART
station cycle paths are in the financial districts of both Berkeley
and San Francisco, so it is extremely expensive real estate.[10]
1563. Moving on to page six, which is section
two, also on BART, it is the issue of bike lockers.[11]
Do you have any idea whether this will be a sensible use of space
in the Crossrail circumstance?
(Mr Holladay) The old system which BART operated
is quite clearly spelt out by that document. The bike lockers
were very much allocated to individuals and the systems which
are being proposed there are more flexible allowing utilisation
of space by a number of people. Again, this overcomes the point
where if somebody is only using the service one or two days a
week it gets better utilisation. If I might also point to what
you mentioned, the cycle centres, it is very relevant. You mentioned
London Bridge. It is operational and one of the big customers
is Financial House, which has 60 employees a day regularly cycling
in and it is very telling when you look to Central London, going
round the major financial operators, the percentage and number
of staff who are actually using bicycles to get to work these
day. There is potential there to both look at the destinations
where large numbers of bikes are parked and figure that most of
those people are coming in by train, those who do not live in
a cycle-able distance. That is a very open prospect where some
people cycle up to 20 miles, but people will come in by train
and then cycle to a major office block and those office blocks
are parking substantial numbers, so correspondingly there should
be substantial numbers at their arrival points in London.
1564. Finally, can we move on to the issue of
lorry movement, which is covered in Exhibit C.[12]
The first section in Exhibit C, (1) includes excerpts from an
as yet unpublished Transport for London research report into deaths
of cyclists involving goods vehicles. What this establishes is
that half of all the cyclists who are killed in London over a
five-year period, from 1999 to 2004, were killed in collisions
involving goods vehicles, despite the fact that this figure makes
up just one per cent of the licensed vehicles in London. The point
we are trying to achieve with this section is to underline the
importance of managing lorry movements and subcontractors in the
construction process of Crossrail. Mr Holladay, can you explain
why lorries, particularly construction lorries, pose such a significant
risk to cyclists?
(Mr Holladay) All large vehicles, HGVs have
very poor all round visibility, they rely very much on mirrors
and have a number of blind spots. When you are on a bike or on
foot as a vulnerable road user adjacent to the left-hand side
of an HGV, the only way the driver is going to see you are there
is if you hold your hand above your head and wave it, they might
just see your hand out of the side of the window of the cab. Also,
with construction site vehicles now most HGVs are required to
have "lifeguards" fitted, that is panels or rails along
the side which tend to stop people from going under the wheels
in a side impact. Vehicles on construction sites, such as tipper
wagons and skip lorries, do not have to have those there, they
would be an encumbrance and they are particularly vulnerable.
Additionally, sites have a demand to get vehicles on and off.
The muck shift for Crossrail is going to be quite substantial
and when you are doing substantial muck shifting it tends to be
four axle rigid tipper trucks which shift them up. As the previous
table shows, 5-axle rigid trucks feature pretty prominently in
the fatalities. We have yet to really get to the bottom of the
mechanism for this, but it seems likely that if you fall and you
fall with a 4-axle rigid truck with no side protection, you go
under twice as many wheels to get mangled. The driving of those
trucks is also something which is under review. This report coincides
with the City of London Police calling a summit about construction
traffic in the City of London. I arrived just after one young
woman cyclist was crushed by a cement mixer and it was later discovered
that this one vehicle had killed another young woman and put another
one in a wheelchair within a very short period of operating around
the City of London. The vehicle, like most concrete mixer trucks,
was operated by a small contractor in livery, in other words most
of the big companies do not actually own their trucks, they are
just hiring people to drive them in livery. There is a strong
need to control the use of construction traffic. There is also
a major pressure on construction traffic. If you have got a continuous
pour of concrete you require the concrete to be coming continuously
to do this, so it would be the means. You eliminate the delivery
of large amounts of bulk material by having a batching plant on
site or you have to co-ordinate a series of trucks, eight wheelers
usually, coming in to deliver the concrete on a regular basis.
It is very important to plan how that material comes in. The same
goes for the extracted waste. You have only got a limited amount
of space on a central London site to stockpile waste material,
you have to get it off-site and to where you are tipping it. This
is where the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was very fortunate in being
able to donate all of the tunnelling material to build a hill
in Stratford. It saved them a big problem, but it is an issue
which is going to come up with digging big holes under London
for Crossrail. It has got to be shifted, it means big heavy goods
vehicle traffic.
1565. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: A point
for clarification, please. You said that this sequence of accidents
occurred with one big truck, do you mean one driver or one truck
driven by different drivers?
(Mr
Holladay) I think the same driver was involved in two of the crashes.
1566. Because it implies that there was a fault
in the vehicle rather than the driver of the vehicle.
(Mr Holladay) No, I do not know whether
I can say this, but I am aware of one contractor being summarily
dismissed from operating on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link site
because of the standards of their drivers' driving. There was
an incident which was witnessed by an engineer I know working
on that site which was exceedingly dangerous driving simply because—I
think it is set out in this—a lot of drivers shifting muck
are paid by the load or required to shift this particular amount
of muck, so productivity is seen as a goal regardless of safety
necessarily. Particularly notable is on-site, when you are operating
trucks you come under the Health and Safety at Work Act on-site,
and there are various conditions to establish the safety case
and assess the risk. As soon as you go out through the gate the
conditions are much less stringent for operating on the road and
we feel that when you have a major project such as this the regime
of risk and hazard management needs to extend beyond the gate.
1567. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: I
speak as someone who has cycled throughout most of my life, including
into London, not so often these days but I still come in occasionally.
If you will pardon the pun, it is a bit of a two-way street, both
literally and metaphorically, in as much as I agree with you about
lorries, but you learn pretty soon to cycle defensively if you
are an experienced cyclist. You do not go up on the inside. It
does not stop accidents completely by any means and I wholeheartedly
agree with you about the need to train not just lorry drivers
but bendy buses are another nice little hazard that you learn
to be careful to avoid. The point I want to make to you is that
as the cyclist touring London, given the rise in a lot of inexperienced
cyclists on the streets of London, we are not talking about what
I would regard as the cyclist nirvana of Holland, do you not think
also there has to be an emphasis on that as well, which is not
to discount the very valid point that you make about the need
for training, the need for enhanced safety standards?
(Mr Holland) I think there is very much
a cultural thing to develop. We have had possibly two generations
where there has not been much of a general public culture of cycling,
of what you do and do not do. It is very interesting, CTC is the
accreditation agency for cycle trainers and I meet up with people
who are doing cycle training. Quite interestingly, you get the
zeal of the convert coming through when they describe how they
take an inexperienced adult cyclist and put them through cycle
training and that inexperienced cyclist is convinced that riding
on a footway is safer, whereas figures and studies show that you
are between four and eight times more likely to have a crash if
you ride on the footway than if you ride on the road. When the
trainees come in they are caring and convinced that footway riding
is a safe way forward. After a period of proper training they
go out with a zeal of a convert saying "No, we must ride
on the road, we must ride as vehicles". You are right, there
is a great deal of education to the general public that the bicycle
has to be ridden as a vehicle when it is being ridden at speed
and is ridden on the road. The other point I would make in terms
of training is that in September 2009, you may be aware, there
will be vocational training for truck drivers. In London we have
had vocational training in advance of the requirement for PSV
drivers, so Transport for London is doing a modular training course
for bus drivers, which includes a module called Big Bus, Little
Bike. There is nothing that particularly dictates which modules
should be taken, but we are doing our utmost at CTC to make sure
that both the truck driver training and bus driver training includes
modules about the relationship between their vehicles and cyclists,
to explain, perhaps, to the driver why you are cycling in the
middle of the lane in front of them rather than at the side. As
a personal issue, I absolutely loath the victim blame sign saying,
"Don't go down the inside" because the greater percentage
of left turning truck incidents would appear to be where the truck
actually forgets the cyclist is there, either when they have made
an overtaking manoeuvre and decided to turn left or they set off
from traffic lights and turn left and the cyclist has not deliberately
ridden up the inside of the truck, they are riding along with
perhaps a naive lack of awareness that there is a thirty tonne
truck there. The awareness of that sort of risk needs to be trained
into the drivers and into the cyclists. I am also aware that there
is a very good piece of video material which was done by the father
of a girl who was, again, killed by a truck in London which makes
the point very adequately that a lot of the time we do not need
to use the big trucks. I think that is a point we are making also
in our submission, that do we need to have the muck shifted by
trucks all the time? Are there ways of making sure it comes out
through the tunnel? Can we shift it out in other ways, and do
we need to bring in big loads as big loads? Can things be brought
in in smaller quantities in vehicles more appropriate?
1568. MR PECK: Thank you. Again, returning
to St Pancras, although you have made the point that most of the
work from the Channel Tunnel Rail link tunnel was removed back
through the tunnel, even on the site of the construction for St
Pancras International, we are aware of several incidents just
from the construction involved in that process.
(Mr Holladay) Yes, particularly I think there were two fatalities
at the same point on the junction of Camley Street and Goods Way.
A number of aspects of the CTRL development were particularly
unsafe for cyclists. The whole area got a reputation of being
a very dangerous place to cycle simply because of the large number
of trucks going in and out delivering and, also, the very temporary
nature of some of the road works. The road lining and signage
was not always to the best practice standards and that was, indeed,
pointed out. I believe in the remedy work and the ratification
Camden are in the process of resigning and relining it in places
where it is positively dangerous.
1569. What do you think Crossrail should be
doing to ensure that these lorry provisions are minimised, hoping
to be reducing movements?
(Mr Holladay) Because of the number of
incidents and the alarming statistics, I am aware that the majority
of cyclists in London are killed by a very small percentage of
the vehicle traffic moving around on the roads. The Metropolitan
Police have a unit which is especially trained in health and safety
risk assessment, which I think is the only one in the country
for looking at this sort of truck movement item. I think we should
be looking at minimising the risks that arise. We should be looking
at proper routing of vehicles and monitoring because the one way
that the Health and Safety Executive deals with risk on factory
and construction sites is to have an effective reporting and monitoring
regime when things do not necessarily come to a fatal, dangerous
or injury outcome, but where a risk is seen or a hazard exists
is to be properly identified and worked on by management.
1570. Would you agree that section 3, which
is the London Cycling Campaign Code of Practice which they suggested
to the ODA, that a version of this could be of useful assistance
to reducing collisions, particularly the sections on driver training,
the use of additional mirrors and so on?[13]
(Mr Holladay) Yes, I think there is a lot to
commend the LCC's Olympic Lorry Code.[14]
It has actually been written by cyclists who are also lorry-drivers,
so they do understand both sides of the fence in this respect.
Item 9 is quite interesting as well. With a London bus, most of
the major operators issue their drivers with cards which cover
section 170 of the Road Traffic Act requirement so that, if you
have a crash or any incident with a bus, the driver simply hands
you the card and says, "Don't have an argument with me. Just
phone my boss and there are all my details". I think that
is the sort of identification that can go into this procedure.
Buses also are required by law to have the operator's name and
address in letters on the nearside so that you can immediately
identify the vehicle and the owner. This identification issue,
I think, is very important. The ability to get back to somebody
and report a hazardous occurrence, bad driving or whatever is
absolutely essential. Intelligence speed application systems,
as we know from the Metropolitan Police on 3,000 vehicles introducing
black boxes, cut down the number of minor incidents. The ability
to monitor the way vehicles are used in town is very important
and intelligence speed application can be fitted to modern vehicles.
One bus operator has done this, Epsom Coaches, and restricted
their buses that only operate within a 30 mph speed limit to 30
mph. As a result, driver stress was reduced and minor incidents
were reduced. I can see an application here where you may have
a site speed limit and be able to actually realistically enforce
it by making sure that the vehicles only travel at those speeds,
and that does have a knock-on effect in the way incidents will
occur and the scale of any incident that occurs. Additionally,
point 6, cycle training, I think, quite often if you train a bus-driver
or a lorry-driver up to realise what the cyclist sees and why
the cyclist is doing those things, there is a much better understanding.
1571. I will very quickly run through some of
the suggestions we would have then on all of these points. On
the latter point, first of all, we would hope that Crossrail would
engage us in further dialogue on the potential for a code of practice
to be used for contractors and for the nominated undertaker, where
they have contractors, to adopt this code of practice. On the
parking issues, we understand that there are considerable anxieties
with Crossrail not to impose too many conditions on acquiring
space within the compulsory purchase area in order to provide
things like cycle parking, but we do feel that the circumstances
are such that the growth in cycling will mean that some sort of
parking must be provided at all stations, both on-street and,
if possible, some of the examples we have given of secure cycle
parking can be done on a local authority/TfL subsidised level.
The examples from San Francisco and from Holland and various places
show that these things do actually result in a large increase
in casual cycle use for short trips. It would be very useful to
have an analysis of the time savings that could be made if one
in 20 Crossrail journeys was actually made by bike, using the
access or the egress modes from those central stations. On the
carriage issues, I think again the evidence from a lot of other
providers and rail companies both in this country and elsewhere
indicates that peak-time bans and the complete liberty to use
services do exist and can operate and, although it would be our
ideal solution to have no ban at all, a peak-time ban, I think,
would be at least a minimum requirement that we think would be
suitable for a new development such as this, given again the likelihood
of an increase in cycle traffic in the future. I think that more
or less covers our Petition and our comments. Mr Holladay, is
there anything else you wanted to say?
(Mr Holladay) I think possibly reflecting
on the policy we drew up at the CTC, described simply in terms
of cycle carriage, we prefer management rather than policing and,
to some extent, it may even reflect that we go for pricing, although
that is a contentious issue when people have had a free service
for a very long time, but the ability to take a bike on a train,
if you want to, is something which can be managed like a market
demand. Obviously when the trains are fairly empty and you want
to get more passengers on, attracting them on with bicycles is
a benefit. If the trains are full and, going by London standards,
you have more passengers than you have got capacity on the trains,
you have to use every available space for passengers and discourage
people. The management side of it is to provide attractive alternatives,
like secure places to park bikes overnight or readily available
cycle hire at stations which is easily accessible to the same
standards as if you were travelling on the train with your own
bike, so the transparency should be that you either travel on
the train with your own bike and get off at the station and make
the journey or, if you cannot travel with your own bike, you get
off at the station and immediately accessible is either a bike
that you have left there overnight or the previous day or there
is a hire bike which is convenient to use for the journey you
wish to undertake in town.
1572. CHAIRMAN: Ms Lieven, you may want
to deal with this, but I think we will not do it now.
1573. MS LIEVEN: My Lord, there is only
one very small issue, important, but small, which I was going
to cross-examine on because, as I have indicated before, where
there are primary issues of fact, and this Petition is really
all about policy and judgment, I would suggest that the more efficient
way for the Committee to deal with it, rather than me making a
rather tedious meal of the issue through cross-examination, is
just to proceed to call Mr Berryman, but I just have one thing
I would like to ask Mr Holladay and perhaps I could do that now.
1574. CHAIRMAN: Yes, you do that.
Cross-examined by MS
LIEVEN
1575. MS LIEVEN: This is only in respect
of the ODA position and the Lorry Code that you put up which is,
I think, your Exhibit C.[15]
Now, what this was, was the Lorry Code that was put forward by
the London Cycling Campaign, was it not?
(Mr Holladay) That is correct.
1576. And it was not actually accepted by the
ODA. I have a note of the ODA's position somewhere. Quite a lot
of these things they did not accept. Are you aware of that?
(Mr Holladay) I am aware that there were
contentious issues, yes.
1577. If I just run through it, item 1, which
is routes and junctions around the Olympic sites to determine
likely pedestrian, cyclist and motorcycle flows, well, that was
a matter that the ODA had actually already carried out as part
of their transport assessment, yes?
(Mr Holladay) Yes.
1578. Item 2, compulsory adoption by contractors
of the Health & Safety at Work Regulations, that is a statutory
requirement, so that was being done in any event, yes?
(Mr Holladay) In respect of managing work-related
road safety, there is a number of issues on that, I think, that
do come up because there were differing standards being quoted.
1579. Item 3, the European Directive, now, that
is actually to be implemented later this year, is it not?
(Mr Holladay) That is correct, yes.
8 The Public Transport Bicycle, Dutch Ministry of
Transport, Public Works and Water Management (SCN-20080228-001) Back
9
The Public Transport Bicycle, Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public
Works and Water Management, Background (SCN-20080228-002) Back
10
Committee Ref: A6, CTC Exhibit B: Cycle parking policies at public
transport systems (LINEWD-93_05-005) Back
11
Committee Ref: A6, CTC Exhibit B: Cycle parking policies at public
transport systems (LINEWD-93_05-006) Back
12
Committee Ref: A6, CTC Exhibit C: Lorries and cyclists (LINEWD-93_05-008) Back
13
Committee Ref: A6, CTC Exhibit C: Lorries and cyclists (LINEWD-93_05-009) Back
14
Committee Ref: A6, CTC Exhibit C: Lorries and cyclists (LINEWD-93_05-010) Back
15
Committee Ref: A6, CTC Exhibit C: Lorries and cyclists (LINEWD-93_05-010) Back
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