The London mayor has pledged to tackle ‘an appalling legacy of neglect’ by ensuring all the capital’s traffic signals comply with the national minimum standards on pedestrian crossing times.
This week, Boris Johnson reassured the Green party’s Jenny Jones that the situation with 707 of Transport for London’s 6,000 signals, which forced pedestrians to ‘sprint across’, would be rectified.
The Department for Transport recommends pedestrian phases of at least 12 seconds. But Jones has highlighted how, at many signals, pedestrians have only one second for every 1.2m.
But Johnson denied that reducing or removing pedestrian phases at other signals, where the former mayor had ‘measurably-reduced effective capacity’ for vehicular traffic, according to TfL, would disadvantage vulnerable road-users.
While he claimed that he was in favour of modal shift to buses and cycles, he told the London Assembly: ‘We should not be pursuing policies to ratchet-up the motorist’s pain.’
It was ‘crazy’ that vehicles had to wait for one minute and 45 seconds at Trafalgar Square’s signals, the mayor said, and then only had 12 seconds to pass through the signals.
Conservative assembly member, Richard Tracey, joked that Londoners ‘vote blue, to go green’.
The London Technical Advisors Group has supported the need for a ‘fresh look’ at this, and other transport problems. ‘You can’t keep on reducing road capacity,’ said chair, Joe Weiss.
But Johnson, while pledging not to ‘cruelly ignore’ the boroughs, as, he claimed, Ken Livingstone had done, equivocated on a Conservative assembly member demand that he devolve decisions over the location of bus stops to the boroughs.
He reiterated his opposition to the Thames Gateway Bridge, but pledged to consider alternative proposals for providing new crossing points downstream of Tower Bridge.
Despite criticism over his plan to replace articulated buses with a ‘Routemaster mark 2’ – LoTAG highlighted that this would decrease road capacity – Johnson said he would press ahead with commissioning a design for the bespoke vehicle, but ‘not at any price’.
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