Londoners on Bikes

Hi all,Wanted to drop you a line about the Londoners On Bikes campaign. It’s a citywide thing, but as I live in Stoke Newington and have been signing people in Old St / Shoreditch / Hackney Central, thought I’d get in touch here. http://www.londonersonbikes.org.uk/Londoners On Bikes (LoB for short) is a volunteer-run campaign focused 100% on the Mayoral election pushing for safer streets for cycling.The opinion polls show Boris & Ken still pretty much neck-and-neck in the race so a relatively small voting bloc can have a huge influence & win some sizeable concessions. That’s our goal and if we can get well on the way to 10000 sign ups in the next couple of weeks we think we’ll acheive it. We’re just past 4200 as I write this. The way that London’s roads are designed & controlled isn’t entirely straightforward – some responsibilities are with the borough councils – and Hackney with its modal filters like at De Bouvior and the cycles only Goldsmiths Row is better than more; but there’s no doubt that the Mayor sets the overall tone and he directs TfL who control most of the main roads in the area.We’re not traffic engineers – we don’t tell politicians or councils how to fix the roads to make things safer there are plenty of other organisations with that expertise. The campaign exists purely to extract some real political will and yes financial commitments to cycling from the candidates (the £35m that was spent on cycle superhighways sounds great until you realise that Ken Livingstone’s modest 7% bus/tube fare cut is costed at £250m/y & motorways cost around £30m PER MILE).Anyway – what we need most of all is for people to sign up on our site spread the word and – if possible – volunteer. Any feedback you have would be gladly (probably) taken on board. The more signatures we collect in the next few weeks the greater a chance we stand of changing things for the better!CheersDuncan (LoB volunteer)”