Forum topic: Cycle Enfield - part of a national strategy to improve our wellbeing

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Cycle Enfield - part of a national strategy to improve our wellbeing

Basil concludes the “controversial” cycling investment opportunity won by Enfield Council as being part of a national strategy and not some crazed in-house Civic Centre scheme to disadvantage some.


It didn’t take the common sense report from the Public Health England to reach such a conclusion. Instead you needed to look no further than the government’s own strategy for cycling:


• "We want to make cycling and walking the natural choice for shorter journeys, or as part of a longer journey regardless of age, gender, fitness level or income."


Or National Planning Policy Guidance 13: Transport, which seeks to integrate transport and planning at the national, regional, strategic and local level with objectives including to:


• promote accessibility to jobs, shopping, leisure facilities and services by public transport, walking and cycling; and
• reduce the need to travel, especially by car


This Planning Guidance is specific in its instructions to Councils, such as Enfield, to:


• give priority to people over ease of traffic movement and plan to provide more road space to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport in town centres, local neighbourhoods and other areas with a mixture of land uses


And so this theme of people / active travel at the expense of a future purely car-centric outlook goes on through London’s own Transport Strategy, the London Plan itself, findings from eg the Roads Task Force and ever more comprehensively researched publications.


What is sad given this level of inevitability is the lost two years or so while parts of western Enfield have been riven by micro level debates over the odd parking space, whether people can walk short distances (or even at all it seems at times), whether cycles are more or less polluting than combustion engines and more. Yes, change inevitably brings winners and losers, but collaboration and understanding through sensible communication with understanding and respect is the means to facilitate achieving the best future path for all. Sadly that approach has too often been missing, too often seemingly deliberately so.

From an ethnographic perspective, it is interesting to watch people so determinedly marching backwards into a rapidly changing future. Unfortunately, when they fall off over a cliff, they will pull me down with them. The argument would be helped if each side presented what they envisage will be the immediate future, that in 20 years’ time, both what they believe will be drivers and what they want that future to include. And hence, what they believe should be done.

There are strong technological and other change drivers both on the High Street and the transport side. Bloomberg predicts that electric cars will be cheaper than fossil fuelled cars by 2022 and they will take a 35% market share by 2040. So where will the charging points be? But since driverless vehicles are also anticipated to quite rapidly replace conventional cars perhaps this is less of a problem than would be the case if the current rate of car ownership were to continue. Given an ageing population in which an estimated 6.5 million people in GB already suffer from a mobility impairment, there should be a very large increase in the number of mobility scooters. Presumably the non-disabled will have to sacrifice both road and road space currently taken by car parking to accommodate the space needed for these scooters. There are other technologies which might also have a significant impact including deliveries by drone and 3D printing.

What will happen to the High Street? The latest govt. retail statistics report that in July 2016 14% of all retail sales were over the internet, 2% up on the previous year. What forms of retailing will then be sustainable on a High Street? What will it be only possible to do on a High Street or better to do on a High Street? And what will be the necessary characteristics for a High Street to thrive in these conditions? The Centre for Retail Research anticipates that the number of retail stores will fall by 22% by 2018 and that share of sales taken by online sales will have risen to 21.5%. Adapt or die seems to be the message.

Conversely, does anyone remember Colin Buchanan's 1963 plan to accommodate increased traffic. London would have become roads with the occasional traffic obstruction in the form of a building.