'Blue Paint Is Not Enough'

If you tend to think of Europe as a uniformly bike-friendly place, you might well be shocked by events in London this month. In the past three weeks, three cyclists have been killed here. This Monday, 2,500 cyclists packed into central London to protest this unacceptable death rate, cycling a route near where 54-year-old Alan Neve was killed by the driver of a truck on Monday morning. This came just 72 hours after a vigil for 20-year-old Phillipine de Gerin-Ricard, the first user of London’s bike-share scheme to die on the city’s roads. What makes these deaths even more worrying is that they happened on London’s network of cycle superhighways, a high-profile cycle lane system whose flaws bike advocates have been warning Londoners about for some time. Alan Neve’s death, for example, happened at a point where cyclists are funneled onto an exceptionally busy road, and fined by police if they avoid it by using a bus lane.

The fatalities have also happened at a time when the London mayor’s office has been promoting city cycling like never before, promising a grand transport vision that places bikes close to its heart. So what on earth is going wrong?