How times have changed. In the late 1890s few people had any inkling that cars would take over the world. It was the age of trams, trains and bicycles. Parliamentarians of the time were fiercely opposed to motor cars. Cathcart Wason MP, spoke in the debate for the Motor Car Act of 1903, famously describing motor cars as “those stinking engines of iniquity from which harmless men women and children have to fly for their lives at the bidding of one of these slaughterers.”
The words of Wason and others went unheeded and as a result motorised traffic grew with few controls. Cars brought benefits, but the cost was high. Our streets are dangerously polluted, considered too risky for children to pay in and dominated by traffic at the expense of people; the country’s transport policy and urban landscape is almost entirely organised around the needs of cars that, for the most part, carry only the driver on a journey of less than 5 miles.
The £90m ‘Mini-Holland’ cycling infrastructure project, is Transport for London’s biggest ever grant and promises to be the start of a timely awakening to local needs and the corrosive effect of cars on our cities.
Given the paltry £1 or £2 per head of population that the government spends on cycling in England, residents of the three boroughs that have won the right to bid for the money (Enfield, Waltham Forest and Kingston) have much to look forward to.
Countries like Denmark and Holland that are considered a benchmark for cycling routinely spend £10-£20 per head, but the Mini Holland awards could be worth more than ten times that amount. If Kingston receives one third of the funding pot, it will represent a spend of over £180 for every one of the borough’s 164,000 residents.
However, some of the very first changes made by Waltham Forest as part of the project have come up against stiff opposition. Road closures have caused tensions, but reclaiming streets from cars and returning them to people can only enhance the local environment for everyone.
The Mini Holland project will see changes across the three boroughs – alterations to the way we use our streets that will be, with luck, the start of a change in the way we prioritise transport needs across the nation. For our part we are proud to be supporting Kingston council’s own Mini Holland project. The ETA is helping deliver over 100 roadshows to promote everyday cycling.
New London mayor Sadiq Khan has spoken of a ‘Mini Hollands for every borough’. If we are to catch up with our European cousins, we must go further still.
0 Comments View now