Once again, last night cyclists and pedestrians descended on Kings Cross to express their anger and sadness at the terrible death toll on London's roads and to send a message to the Mayor and Transport for London (TfL) that we need streets designed for movement of people on foot and on bikes, not just those in vehicles. The event was organised by Bikesalive who claim that "polite meetings and symbolic action have had no effect" and the time has come to say enough is enough with peaceful direct action to close the gyratory for an hour a week until TfL start to design our streets for people flow not vehicle flow.
Green mayoral candidate, Jenny Jones lead the way on her bike followed by hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians filling the streets around the traffic dominated gyratory with noisy calls of "where's Boris?".
There were many pedestrians amongst the cyclists and plenty of people who were clearly not "transport geeks", just Londoners infuriated by the way our streets are managed and prepared to come along to show they care. One woman passing through Kings Cross on her bike who hadn't known about the demo in advance, joined in saying she was "so glad the demo was happening - I nearly get killed here every day".
The policing was exemplary. Officers were sensitive to the strength of feeling about road death and injury. They coped admirably with the lack of leaders, enabled the demo to take place and kept people safe.
As Jenny Jones said in her blog "road deaths and injuries are still too often seen as unavoidable in a modern society", clearly this has to change. It is absolutely not acceptable that so many families should pay such a high price for travelling on London's roads. I'll be there next week and hope others will too.
