Town hall Stalins are on a Covid-fuelled ego trip
By Giles CorenOn the school run yesterday, forced into a circuitous route by a road closed two weeks ago for a hole that didn’t need digging in the first place and still hasn’t been filled back in, I found my alternative road also in a mess, narrowed by plastic bollards and thus swollen with traffic. This was to make room for a new cycle lane, which is not something I am necessarily against, being an occasional cyclist myself, except that, like a Marks & Spencer mince pie, this was not just any bicycle lane. This was a special, important, virus-busting, Camden council Covid-19 bicycle lane.Oh yes it was. I know that because the traditional blue bicycle lane logo, which they must have felt was not emphatic enough in this time of global emergency (isn’t it all just too exciting?), was set inside a much bigger, bright red sign with “Covid-19” written on it, in massive great white letters.It was so huge and red and urgent that, before I realised it was only announcing a cycle lane, I took it for a much more pressing hazard warning, like for a flood or a landslide, and braked hard and cowered and looked around for the terrifying virus, which had presumably taken corporeal form and was now marching the streets of lower Kentish Town, devouring victims with its monstrous fangs.But, no, it was just for this Covid-19 cycle lane. A thing of which I had never, until that moment, heard. And I thought how clever of Camden council, or the mayor of London, or whoever put this sign up, to have found a way to make cycle lanes to tackle specific viruses. And I wondered why we are putting all this money and fuss into vaccines, when the coronavirus can so easily be fought off with targeted road alterations?And if they can make cycle lanes that protect against Covid-19, then perhaps they could lay some down that protect against the flu, which kills a lot of people too? And maybe a network of human papillomavirus mini roundabouts? And some sort of HIV motorway?Unless, of course, these specially signed Covid-19 cycle lanes do not have any anti-viral capabilities at all, and are merely of a piece with all the other ridiculous road alterations which car-hating councils and mayoralties are implementing all over the country, under the cynical fig leaf of “preventing the spread of the virus”.Like the miles of ugly red and white plastic barriers being placed along main roads, parallel to the pavement, supposedly to make the walkway wide enough for people to pass each other without swapping bodily fluids, but entirely pointless because nobody walks in them, on account of how they are yucky wet trenches, knee-deep in rubbish (mostly discarded masks and empty disposable plastic hand-sanitiser bottles). And also because walking on pavements is now automatic human behaviour, whereas walking in roads simply isn’t. So all they accomplish is the slowing down of the traffic to make noisy, smelly jams that are not nice to sit in, and even less to nice to walk alongside, in a litter-strewn gutter.And like the entirely counterproductive all-day bus lanes (time-sensitive bus lanes were one of the great leaps forward in human mobility — up there with the wheel and, before that, the knee), which the mayor of London has rolled out all over the city this year under cover of the virus, in the hope that we’ll all be so worried about getting ill that we won’t notice, or bother to complain. That we’ll just sit there all afternoon in massive single-lane suburban tailbacks that don’t need to be there, watching empty buses sail down the empty bus lane beside us, and say nothing because in some way that only Sadiq Khan understands, it’s stopping people dying in care homes.Well, it isn’t. And nor are all the new one-way systems and pedestrianisations, or the weird cycle lanes absurdly marked out now between the edge of the pavement and the parked cars, which are going to get a lot of us run over and killed before Covid gets anywhere near us.I’m not against the war on cars, per se. I drive electric, I cycle, I walk. I’d pull all cars off the road tomorrow and make the whole world carbon neutral now if it were down to me.What I hate is the pusillanimity. The disingenuousness. It’s the same little Stalins in local government who hate drivers for the freedom and relative wealth that driving connotes — and wear high-vis gilets at home to put the bins out, or empty the dishwasher — who just loooooove the coronavirus because of the new licence it gives them to restrict people’s basic freedoms and put up yet more signs, feeling a mild tumescence in their saggy BHS Y-fronts as they rubber-stamp an order for 1,000 more special “Covid-19 bus stop” posters from the Pointless Intrusive Signage Department.These neo-Soviet throwbacks want everyone to have a crap time because it’s only fair and egalitarian. They close the pubs and clubs and restaurants (shouting “coronavirus!” with a huge grin as they slap their court orders on the shuttered doors) and then sit down and think to themselves, “How can we make everyone even more miserable at this awful time? I know! We can close all the roads to every kind of vehicle except buses and then only let three people on each one ‘because of the virus’ and make everyone else walk to wherever they’re going in the fumy gutter, alongside the lines of idling cars owned by capitalist bastards making their evil anti-revolutionary journeys!”Just as the virus has put the mockers on all our efforts to turn away from our disposable culture and filled the world with more plastic junk than ever before, it has also stopped in its tracks the gradual move towards more consensual forms of traffic management (the removal of pavement barriers and one-way systems, the introduction of mixed-use thoroughfares and the reduction of roadside “furniture” that had been going so well) and given power right back to the miserable bastards who just want us all to stay at home, all the time, and never go anywhere, ever.
Rahman Hyatt ● 2146d4 Comments