I would cycle, but there are too many roads

March 28, 2018 8:42 AM

Jay Foreman asks: Why isn't Cycling Normal in London? [SLYT] [11:00] [with subtitles]

Hint: There's no more content after the advert at the end of the video.

Bonus

Let's go to Perivale! [SLYT] [1:47]

posted by Juso No Thankyou (15 comments total)

Compared to Australia (and, I imagine, much of the US), London is an Amsterdam-style cycling utopia. Plenty of bike lanes (though most non-segregated) and quiet designated cycling routes running parallel to main roads (which may be found here), and, more importantly, a culture in which ordinary people (as opposed to extreme adrenaline junkies) cycle around in their everyday clothes as part of their day-to-day business. In the morning/evening peak, the roads of central London are swarming with bikes.
posted by acb at 8:50 AM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Where is this part two?
posted by pracowity at 9:10 AM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

The videos that my city makes to promote cycling look exactly like that one from London in the '80s or whenever.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:41 AM on March 28, 2018

I loved the information present... But the presentation itself was cringeworthy to me. It was hard to get through all of the 'humor' and fake reenactments, and people pretending to be 'man on the street', etc. Ironically, all of the unneeded content probably consisted of 80% of the production time/effort that went into this.

I'm sure that's merely his style (and will endeavor not to watch any of his stuff again, which is a shame, as there was a lot of interesting content in there).
posted by el io at 1:13 PM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I also enjoyed Jay Foreman's Unfinished London and Map Men series. His style of humour may not be for everyone, but the content of his videos is quite interesting.
posted by good in a vacuum at 2:33 PM on March 28, 2018

Okay, I have Opinions about all of this, but first, I want to thank el io for the obligatory MeFi "I hate this entertaining and approachable format! Why coudn't they have presented it in a wall of dry 11pt Times New Roman text?"

Jay Foreman has been active in the London Green Party for quite a while, and has used his children's-humourist style to make some highly popular videos to get various points across. The Unfinished London and Map Men series have already been hilighted.

The important thing for me right now is that his next video will cover the terribly-named "Cycle Superhighway 9", which is a family-friendly protected cycleway that will go through West London. The local Tories have been campaigning against it, and are working hard to get an older and wealthier Chiswick NIMBY vote out to crush it when it goes before the Hounslow Cabinet this Autumn.

Opponents of CS9 have claimed that it would do more damage to Chiswick than the Luftwaffe (the first V1 to hit London landed in the neighbourhood), a church asked parishioners to pray it away, and a local Tory Assembly Member did a video with some Tory council candidates talking about how it would "destroy the village feel" of the area but you could barely hear what he was saying over the motor traffic noise around him. We've had one business in particular get very personal with its opposition campaign, and then it drags up any little scrap it can to try and pretend we're the ones getting personal. It's utter Trump politics from these folks: blame your opposition with your own shady dealings.

I really look forward to what Jay comes up with as an approachable explanation of why CS9 is desirable. I don't expect it to be an academic treatise on the subject, but something that will help the general public feel disposed toward something that could help reduce the number of deaths on the fourth worst road per-mile for motor vehicle collisions with vulnerable road users.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:17 AM on March 29, 2018 [6 favorites]

his children's-humourist style to make some highly popular videos to get various points across

His style wouldn't be out of place on BBC2 or Channel 4 documentaries, but frankly, with the amount of research and attention to detail he throws at his videos, the style is just the cherry on the top. I mean, 262,936 subscribers ain't bad now, is it?

Compared to Australia (and, I imagine, much of the US), London is an Amsterdam-style cycling utopia
Unfortunately, that is a bad comparison, as the video clearly demonstrated. Leave out the Amsterdam-style part, and then we're talking.

Yes, it would seem there's an awful lot of hyperbole flying around with CS9:

Additionally, as reported in the Evening Standard last year, Father Michael Dunne of a church in Chiswick claimed CS9 would cause more problems than the 'Luftwaffe' by obstructing funeral and wedding processions.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 1:30 AM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

I liked the video and have been sharing it with my cycling friends. I would rather that the vox pops were not faked though, it adds a sheen of unreality to the delivery of the information that detracts from the immediacy, in my opinion.
Cycling in my city is pretty fraught, there has been some attempt to introduce some cycle lanes recently, but they are not coherent or contiguous. I don't think they mention in the video that it is important for cycle lanes to be contiguous in order for the take up to be successful. A partial network is orders of magnitude less effective than one that runs continuously. Cycle lanes that end abruptly, run over road junctions or simply aren't segregated are dangerous and discouraging to cyclists. People shouldn't have to be battle hardened cycling veterans to brave a few miles on a bicycle.
posted by asok at 2:19 AM on March 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

The NIMBYs are BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).
posted by acb at 3:23 AM on March 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

I was wondering when you'd show up here hobo.
CS9 has indeed absolutely kicked off. I think a lot of it was from the church which uses the giant pavements outside as an assembly point for services. There are often well-dressed folk standing outside for a wedding or a funeral or what not. (I mean look at all this pavement).
They're using publicly owned pavements as free amenities for their business essentially, and then getting cross when we want to use it for it's intended purpose.
Chiswick actually has MASSIVE pavements throughout and I think the cyclepath isn't even reducing them much, if at all.

So far the whole debate has been farcical in the extreme, from the tory councillors claiming that the cyclepath will take away from the quaint village feel of Chiswick, but having to shout over the traffic noises to do so.

or their claim that Sadiq Khan's plan (It's not, it was originated under Boris Johnson) would increase air pollution (because of all the emissions from the cyclists presumably) and harm local businesses (because if you're cycling you can't just stop and get off for a bun or some shopping like you could if you were in a car, bearing in mind that there is basically no parking at all) and of course TfL didn't even think about putting it on the A4 (They did, it would be really stupid)

So all in all Jay and Paul don't need to add much absurdity of their own. It's already absurd.
(I would add that although Jay is the frontman Paul Kendler co-wrote it as well as films and directs)
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:49 AM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

acb, did you know I actually learned BANANA at university in the early 2000s? (I went back to school after dropping out in the 90s to do the dot-com fiasco) This is what a quality Urban Studies education gets you!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:59 AM on March 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

the tory councillors claiming that the cyclepath will take away from the quaint village feel of Chiswick

Shouldn't they be pushing for narrower automotive lanes and reduced speeds? Get all those Mr Toads out of their quaint villages feels?
posted by pracowity at 11:38 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yes, it's been a real flurry of bizarre motorist counter-arguments. The most common one you get is that if we take lane space away from motors and give it to cycling, the result will be more congestion and thus more pollution. It's something I'm sure some oil industry think-tank came up with years ago, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. Fortunately there's a generation of politicians here who aren't falling for it. We have plenty of research now showing that mode shift is happening and that safe cycling infrastructure accelerates that. See this TfL slide deck for a quick summary.

And Just this Guy: it's not actually about the pedestrians using that pavement that's the problem. They're worried because rather than park their hearse at the corner to load a coffin, they drive it right onto the pavement!

The local Tories who campaign against CS9 have been waffling about 'alternative routes' as a way to try and make their voters think they're going to prevent a cycling version of the M4 on their streets. Fortunately folks in LBHF have written an excellent FAQ on this topic which has made it easier for people to refute the weird FUD going around.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:05 AM on April 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Here's an outtake from the sequel to this video:
posted by ambrosen at 12:13 PM on April 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Here's the sequel: Why drivers should want cycle lanes.
posted by ambrosen at 3:00 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]