Pedestrian Liberation

In Cambridge cycles are making this own claims to the pavement. In this street the back gardens were sold for housing which lost them their back access so the bikes and trailers now end up on the pavement. Possibly a cycle rack in the road in place of a resident parking bay would be in order? I have spoken to a London Borough who wished to do just this, however their legal guys thought that while it was legal to leave a big vehicle on the highway that it was possibly not legal to install cycle racks. They may have a point, but equally according to the Law it is not legal to leave any ‘thing’ in the highway and that includes cars.

Newnham cycles

Someone has since suggested one of these, cycle racking for 6 bicycles in the space of a single car. However there is likely to be a planning issue with installing something permanent on the highway.

Cycle rack the size of a car

The picture below shows a car parked almost completely across the pavement. This would not currently classed as obstruction by our council or the local police because no one is actually being obstructed at this very moment and would use the fact that the woman seen walking away from us with her shopping was able to get past (just) as evidence for the lack of obstruction.

The fact that an elderly person who uses a wheelchair lives a few doors down is considered irrelevant because he is not trying to pass at this moment. The fact that the person may not even bother trying to get down the pavement any more because they knows that it is impossible is not considered relevant. To add insult to injury, if someone passing the vehicle accidentally scratched the vehicle with a bag, buggy or wheelchair then they would have caused an offense against the owner of the car!

Not an obstruction

The only reason that it might be classed as obstruction in this case is because the person may have had to have ‘trespass’ onto private property to get past. A police officer I have just been talking to about this thought that this would indeed be evidence of obstruction.

When I arrived at the Melia White House Hotel in London recently I found that there was no convenient and secure place to lock up my bike. Feeling rather irritated about this and noticing the impressive range of cars parked up on the pavement around the entrance I choose to leave my bike on an unusable section of pavement close to the font-door where the porter could keep an eye on it.

Unfortunately, the porter told me that I couldn’t leave it there for ‘elf and safety’ reasons. I press him politely, I then pressed his boss and then that person’s boss as well. The conclusion was that if I left my bike there then it would get removed, but that I could carry it through the hotel up into my colleague’s room which was a bit weird. Unfortunately, by that time my colleague, who had been fascinated by the conversation, was ready to leave so I wasn’t able to test out their lifts with my very grubby bike.  We left, took a few photos and put my bike somewhere else. The staff were helpful, polite and very professional throughout, but were being constrained by some very stupid and indefensible hotel policies. Health and Safety being yet again wheeled out as the catch-all reason to enforce any daft prejudice.

My bike was a ‘health and safety’ risk, the BMW and plant container on the pavement next to it were not!

These Range Rovers on the pavement outside the hotel clearly aren’t a health and safety problem