Roads: Motorists and Cyclists

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, for an opportunity to participate in this debate. I am not a traffic expert, or knowledgeable about the legal side. What interests me is the wider perspective of the quality of public urban space. The behaviour of and interaction between all road users ought to be a significant aspect of that quality.

If we were to be concerned foremost with how we conceive the urban environment—and we have always had some idea of what that is—it could be argued that the responsibilities of motorists, cyclists and pedestrians might sit very differently according to what the conception is. Our response as a society to road users will carry a tone inevitably based on their current modes of behaviour. I say that because there is mounting evidence that the shared-space schemes being introduced across the world, for many years now in Europe—particularly in Holland; and several in Britain, including the recent Exhibition Road scheme in the heart of London, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, and the Seven Dials modification that has worked so well for more than 20 years—change people’s behaviour.

I first came across the work of the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman a couple of years ago in Tom Vanderbilt’s very readable book, Traffic. Sadly, Monderman died in 2008, but he and others such as Ben Hamilton-Baillie in Britain have been keen to remove the hegemony that motorists still largely occupy within the urban space. Monderman indeed called motorists “guests” within what he termed “the social world”, as opposed to the “traffic world” of the motorway. The shared-space movement wishes not only to reduce the level of accidents, but to achieve, as a goal in itself, a closer and more equal relationship between road users by levelling the road surface, including pavements, and removing road markings and signs. Monderman wanted to take out all traffic lights so that all road users could freely negotiate with each other, and so that—this is the important point in terms of this debate—that negotiation becomes the prime responsibility, rather than the need to obey a multitude of externally imposed rules. There are several films on YouTube demonstrating these schemes, including in Drachten in Holland, and Berne in Switzerland. The latter is fascinating to watch because on an urban street with more than 20,000 vehicles a day it is the motorists who give way to the pedestrians.

There have been criticisms of shared space, many of which come from the most vulnerable in society and therefore need to be listened to. However, I agree with those who say that there should be more explanation of the concept itself when schemes are introduced. Shared space is still fundamentally radical. It is against segregation of road users as much as possible, against control, and against aggressive lobbying by all user groups. Apparently, to illustrate his schemes, Hans Monderman would walk backwards into the traffic with his eyes closed—vehicles calmly going around him.

On a serious note concerning the incident in Bristol last year between a bus driver and a cyclist, Veronica Pollard from Life Cycle UK said that motorists and cyclists should,

“be more courteous to each other”.

I agree. Monderman talks about “negotiation” and Ben Hamilton-Baillie about “civility”, but I think that people will not become courteous simply because they are told to do so. Importantly, people cannot be forced to do so through the courts. It is worth contrasting the fast, heavily signed, overdirected and, in fact, normal urban space around the huge Stokes Croft roundabout in Bristol with any of the new schemes. I think that if that district were to be converted into a shared-space environment, such incidents would not occur. One of the things that the shared-space movement is doing is to highlight the particularity of the conventional traditional method of treating urban space, and showing it up as being simply not good enough.