Whoever came up with the term ‘traffic calming’ to describe the gauntlet of chicanes, pedestrian islands and speed bumps British street planners put in place to modulate the flow of traffic was clearly an ironist of the first order. The theory, of course, is that the presence of such obstacles in the road and the need to steer accurately around them will cause motorists to slow down, take a more thoughtful approach to their driving and proceed in a calm and stately manner.
One forms a vision of brightly coloured putt-putt cars being driven slowly and oh-so-carefully around a figure-of-eight course by earnest young children at a fairground, and perhaps that’s the way it plays out in the computer modelling. If so, it is yet another example – if one were needed – of the triumph of ivory tower rationalisation over reality and common sense, for as anyone who has ever pedalled a bicycle down such modified streets can tell you, nothing is more likely to inflame passions, raise blood-pressure and bring out the worst in human nature than a bit of ‘traffic calming’.
I have to run a few of these ‘becalmed’ stretches every day on the homeward leg of my rides, just when the morning rush is starting to build, and I feel the tension starting to build a full half mile before I get there. There is nothing calming about these stretches at all, certainly not among the motorists who are jockeying for position. Courtesy, decency, patience, the Golden Rule and respect for others go out the window like cigarette butts. It’s ‘me first’ all the way. Behaviour that would get a toddler sent home from pre-school with a note pinned to his jacket becomes the norm, except the toys that are being played with here are real cars and real trucks being driven by grown-ups at a very real thirty-five miles an hour, or better.
For the sake of a few meaningless fractions of a second, decent people who would probably, in other circumstances, risk their lives to rescue you from a fire or a pounding surf, will blithely take a chance on killing or crippling you in their unthinking haste to be first through the troublesome, irritating chicane. Cocooned in their two-tonnes of steel and glass, with the radio on and in mid-text, already made tetchy by all the other erratic traffic around them, they do not see your humanity, nor would they be interested.
All they want is to get clear and speed up, and as a slow-poke cyclist you are just another thing in the way, a nuisance, a rolling speed-hump as it were, and so they elbow past, frighteningly close, if you haven’t grabbed your share of the lane, or loom up close behind you, horns tooting peremptorily if you have, maybe shouting something about road tax as they swerve violently past you and accelerate away. No, there is nothing calm or calming about traffic calming measures; they are merely pouring oil on troubled flames.
So true, I feel Central London can be safer than the suburbs precisely because congestion causes the cars to slow down, and there are bus lanes to cycle in.
Today in the suburbs someone rolled down their window and called me a freak just for taking the road at a.junction. Ridiculous, I have never driven sdo discourteously in my life!