The Museum of London Roundabout at the western end of London Wall in the City had a road safety scheme installed a few weeks ago. The Museum blocked sight lines across the roundabout and traffic speed was quite high making it difficult particularly for cyclists to negotiate it safely. The solution: reduce the two entry lanes to one on all entry roads this reducing the roundabout to one lane from two and enabling a lane for cyclists to be introduced.

Unfortunately the result of this “experimental” scheme has been to create long queues of traffic westbound on London Wall, particularly in the mornings as can be seen from the photo right. At peak times it could take 11 minutes to go from Moorgate to the London Wall roundabout.

The City of London Corporation have produced a report on this which you can find on the internet and they are proposing to revert the London Wall entry to the roundabout to two lanes which they hope will fix the problem. We will see in due course, but in the meantime I have sent in a complaint to the Corporation.

This is of course a classic example of changes to road infrastructure in the name of road safety, particularly reductions in road space, road narrowing and reassigning space to cyclists which increases travel time for motorists very substantially.

Another example is the proposals for Bow Roundabout – a junction of the A12 Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach, A11 Bow Road and A118 High Street Stratford. This interchange sits below the A118 Bow Flyover, and above the River Lea. It is now proposed to improve pedestrian access across the junction with considerable changes to the junction and the introduction of a light controlled pedestrian crossing. Journey times for some motorists and bus passengers to cross the junction might increase by as long as two minutes and cyclists might suffer an extra minute also.

We have objected to these proposals by responding to the public consultation. You may care to do the same. It seems odd to even be consulting on this matter because according to a report in LTT, Transport for London are considering a proposal that would remove the flyover and roundabout altogether (the roundabout has of course been the scene of a number of accidents to cyclists but these proposals do not seem to be about cycle safety).