Street Talks

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June’s Street Talk

Ben Whitelaw, The Times: Maintaining the pressure – what’s next for The Times Cycle Safe campaign?

The Times Cities Fit for Cycling Campaign has gone from strength to strength since it was launched in February of this year. Highlights include a parliamentary debate and Mayoral hustings – helping to push the issue of cycle safety up the political agenda. All the main political parties have pledged their support for the campaign, but there is plenty of hard work to come – turning fine words from politicians into meaningful action to achieve the aims of the eight point Cycle Safe Manifesto.

The Times want to hear your thoughts on what they should do next, tapping into the passion, knowledge and aspiration that helps make discussions at Street Talks so lively. What are the priority issues to be addressed and opportunities to be seized? Should national, London wide and borough policy be rewritten, and if so how? Boris Johnson has pledged his support for the campaign, as England’s most powerful local politician how should he be held to account and his track record assessed?

We hope you can join us and Ben Whitelaw from The Times for June’s Street Talk to help answer these and other questions, this will be your opportunity to help shape the next stages of the Cities Fit for Cycling Campaign. Please note that for this month only Street Talks will be held at Look Mum No Hands.

7pm on Monday 11th June at Look Mum No Hands, 49 Old Street, EC1V 9HX

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Chock full of goodness – our spring/summer Street Talks line up

1st May 2012

Judith Green, Reader in Sociology of Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Identity and the city – what your choice of transport says about you

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 1st May.

Full details here.

11th June 2012

Ben Whitelaw, The Times: Maintaining the pressure – what’s next for The Times Cycle Safe campaign

7pm on Monday 11th June at Look Mum No Hands, 49 Old Street, EC1V 9HX

3rd July 2012

John Dales, Director – Urban Movement, Urban Initiatives: Machiavellian street design – the art of the possible & the avoidance of self-destruction

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 3rd July.

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May’s Street Talk – Full details

Judith Green, Reader in Sociology of Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: Identity and the city – what your choice of transport says about you

Some Londoners have a large choice of how they move around the city – others rather less. How much choice you have, and what you choose, depends in part on transport availability and accessibility, and your resources; but also on the cultural associations that become attached to different modes of transport. Social identities (gendered, aged, ethnic and other) as well as practical considerations influence whether we see ourselves as ‘the kind of person’ who cycles, or catches the bus, or drives.

Understanding perceptions of transport modes is essential if we want to change the ways people move around the city. Cyclists in London are disproportionately ‘affluent white men’: why is an accessible form of transport (in theory) so narrowly appealing in practice? Bus travel, in contrast, was once the mode of last resort for those with no other options. However, policies to provide bus travel for free for two key age groups (under 18s and older citizens) have arguably made bus travel a valued, rather than stigmatised way to travel, for these groups. Social identities are bound up in transport choices, but these are clearly not fixed – they can change as a result of both the deliberate outcomes and unintended consequences of policy.

We hope you can join us and Judith Green from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for May’s Street Talk to explore some of the changing cultural perceptions of transport modes in London, in particular cycling and bus travel. What makes a particular form of transport more or less appealing to particular kinds of people?

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 1st May.

Judith Green is a medical sociologist, with degrees in anthropology and medical sociology. She is part of the Transport and Health Group at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her current research includes studies of inequalities in road injury, transport policies, and the sociology of active transport modes. The On the Buses project is evaluating the impact of free bus travel for young people on public health. Judith edits Critical Public Health, an international peer-reviewed journal which publishes a broad range of critical research and commentary on and for public health, and recently co-edited a collection of articles from the journal, Critical Perspectives in Public Health.

Judith’s talk will draw on research by the Transport and Health group at LSHTM, including research funded by Transport for London, NHS Camden and NIHR Public Health Research Programme (project number 09/3001/13). The views and opinions expressed in the talk are those of the presenter, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Health, other funders or colleagues.

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April’s Street Talk – Full details

Ashok Sinha and Richard Lewis, London Cycling Campaign: Love London, Go Dutch – how we can make our streets as safe and inviting for cycling as they are in Holland

Cycling is on the up. It’s fashionable now (at least in London’s trendier postcodes). All the main candidates for London Mayor say promoting cycling will be a priority if they are elected. The Times has run a major national cycle safety campaign culminating in a parliamentary debate and a frequently antagonistic press has (albeit grudgingly at times) acknowledged the good sense of pro-cycling public policy. So all is rosy then? Not quite. The modal share for cycling in London remains pitifully low, and the capital continues to be a generally hostile place for cyclists, especially the young or inexperienced. Meanwhile climate change, air pollution, inactive lifestyles and too-often dismal urban design pose major challenges to Londoners.

It’s all so much different in places such as The Netherlands. That’s why making London more liveable by making our streets as safe and inviting for cycling as Holland is the benchmark that the London Cycling Campaign is setting this year’s mayoral candidates, though our Love London, Go Dutch campaign. In this talk LCC CEO Ashok Sinha and LCC technical expert Richard Lewis will explain how this can be done, and why the finale of the campaign, the Big Ride on 28th April, is so important.

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 3rd April.

Ashok Sinha is the Chief Executive of the London Cycling Campaign, having previously been the Director of the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition. He has a PhD in renewable energy and spent a number of years pursuing research into climate change science before moving into policy work with Forum for the Future. He has also served as Director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, during which time he helped found and govern Make Poverty History. His voluntary activities include having been Vice Chair of both Amnesty International UK, and the London Cycling Campaign, and serving on the Advisory Board of Capacity Global.

Richard Lewis is a long-time campaigner for sustainable transport, cycling and better cities for people. He works as a principal policy planner for LB Newham and previsouly achieved signing of a Road Danger Reduction Charter at Haringey and Brent Councils, translated into enduring policies and new approaches to street design. His Brent policies influenced LB Lambeth to take up RDR and to go further than Brent by appointing a dedicated RDR officer. He has written a Local Implementation Plan, annual transport funding bids and transport/urban design policies; completed progressive danger-reduction related public realm design guides for Hackney and Newham; and obtained seed funding to establish with the local community a streets for people scheme in Kilburn, which was eventually completed using £1.2m of TfL funding. Richard takes inspiration from a recent visit to Copenhagen which transformed his views regarding cycling infrastructure, bringing him closer to LCC’s Go Dutch campaign.

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From the archives: Tom Barry’s Street Talks Presentation

Tom Barry, Boris Watch: State of the city – the highs and lows of London transport policy 2000 – 2011 (8th March 2011)

It’s almost a year since Boris Watch’s Tom Barry kicked off Street Talks. Here’s his analysis of Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson’s track record on transport, a very handy summary as we appraoch a Mayoral election in which transport is likley to be a key issue.

Presentations from all previous Street Talks are available here.

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March’s Street Talk

Anna Minton, author of Ground Control – Fear and happiness in the twenty-first century city

London has been transformed by development and regeneration projects in recent years, many of them privately financed. With public purse strings held tight is private sector investment now essential to the creation of a more liveable London? Is there a price to pay for a public realm that is increasingly owned or managed by private companies and watched over by CCTV? Have Business Improvement Districts, mega shopping malls, gated residential and commercial developments, even the Olympic Park led to regeneration and rejuvenation, or have they intensified social divisions and made us more fearful of each other?

We hope you can join us and Anna Minton, author of Ground Control for March’s Street Talk to explore the impact of private ownership and control of urban spaces and places on public life.

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on 6th March.

Anna Minton is a writer and journalist. She spent a decade in journalism, including a stint as a corporate reporter on the Financial Times, and is the winner of five international journalism awards. Finding daily journalism frustrating she began to focus on longer projects for think tanks and policy organizations. Ground Control emerged from a series of agenda setting reports, two of which were published by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the other by the think tank Demos. The first focused on gated communities and ghettoes in the US, questioning to what extent these trends are emerging in the UK. The second looked at polarization and culture in one British city, Newcastle, and the third investigated the growing privatisation of public space.