Just caught up on the past dozen or so pages. Blimey it's still going, but still some good stuff too.
One of the significant factors in creating London suburbs and sprawl was the development of the tube system. I recommend those interested in travel in London read Christian Wolmar's 'The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built and How it Changed the City for Ever'.
Clearly in London the underground has a major impact on allowing greater commuter distance and other travel (eg to the West End for shopping or a night out). One of the things I admire about the Superhighways concept is the way they echo this pattern of travel, providing a clear alternative option.
I'm interested in the segregation or not question partly because I work with school kids and I'm interested in how, without segregation, we can get them cycling to school as school pupils routinely do in the Netherlands. I don't consider cycle training to be exclusively the solution.
It seems clear to me in the first place that we're failing to do enough to control motor traffic speeds and volume away from the distributor roads.
(To explain for those unfamiliar with the terminology: The theory, at least for motorists, goes like this. You live in a street and you wiggle on backstreets to a road that has been designated a distributor road (eg A roads) which you follow to nearby your destination where you leave the distributor to wiggle on back streets to where you're going.)
Residents of back streets who are used to taking the car for every short journey will object to council attempts at road closure, eg using bollards to divide a street, to make each half a cul de sac with one way in or out where they are accustomed to two. The perceived inconvenience to their car usage for them outways the pedestrian/cyclist/liveability benefits of reduced through-traffic and lower speeds. Instead the council installs less contentious speed cushions, which vans pelt through and render largely ineffectual.
Even if you do get the back streets truely calmed you've still got to tackle the distributors - on the one hand having loads of places which feel safe and easy to cross them, and on the other having a way of going along them if there isn't a wonderful back route that takes you to all the places on the distributor that you want to go. In the absence of a segregated cycle lane here then a bus lane is likely to offer the solution IF it's 24/7 and IF the bus drivers are trained and expected to drive in the most cycle friendly way possible giving every possible latitude to primary school children and grannies.
The alternative is 'feral' cycling where the nervous/inexperienced ride on the pavement in the bits where they fear the road.
I'm angling to start projects to try to increase cycling to two neighbouring schools - one primary, one secondary - jammed in the mass of largely one-way distributors between the Elephant & Castle and the Thames bridges
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=notre+dame+school+st+georges+road+se1&aq=&sll=51.497897,-0.106108&sspn=0.006278,0.02105&ie=UTF8&hq=notre+dame+school&hnear=St+George's+Rd,+London+SE1,+United+Kingdom&ll=51.496801,-0.106108&spn=0.006613,0.02105&z=16
Should be interesting!
