Silvertown Tunnel Opens

Silvertown Shuttle(cock)

7 April marks the opening of the new Silvertown Tunnel crossing of the river Thames.

The estimated £2.2 billion largely privately financed tunnel features bus lanes and adds tolling for private cars and lorries (lorries being likely a significant proportion of use) to both Silvertown and the Blackwall tunnel.

The rationale for the tunnel is to deliver much-needed (according to the Mayor and TfL) capacity to alleviate congestion across east London and deliver new economic opportunities.

But the reality based on just about every other such scheme ever is it’s likely to increase motor traffic in large swathes of east London.

Of course, Silvertown opens with a ban on cycling and walking through the tunnel – but with the sticking plaster of a minimum one year operation of a free cycle shuttle bus to carry people and their cycles through the tunnel from Greenwich to Royal Docks and vice versa.

Silvertown Shuttle Bus

TfL has guaranteed that the Silvertown shuttle bus will run for a minimum of a year, for free, carrying people turning up with a cycle through the tunnel. The issues with it however have been increasingly clear.

The shuttle is set to run from stops near the new City Hall in Royal Docks on the north side to north Greenwich peninsula near the Millennium Village on the south. Neither of these stops are currently well placed for cycling.

The south side means cycling on hostile roads far from the Cycleway 4 ‘desire line’ while the north side ends up in one of the most cycle-unfriendly bits of Royal Docks.

The bus will only run until 9:30pm every 12 minutes and each bus can only carry a maximum of eight standard cycles, or four standard cycles and a cargo bike or adapted cycle etc. plus seven folded cycles either way.

This means that in the busiest hour, assuming no one wants to cross the Thames with any form of wider/bigger cycle, the bus will take 40 standard cycles and 35 folding cycles. Given the sheer number of people cycling both sides of the river and crossing the river in east London daily, there’s likely to be one of two outcomes.

Either the bus will be popular and prove its use, but then be immediately hugely oversubscribed during the peak hours, or people won’t want to wait to load their cycle onto a shuttle bus and will stick to other river crossings.

From an accessibility point of the view, Wheels for Wellbeing, a charity seeking to breakdown the barriers to Disabled adults and children cycling, have published their full assessment of the bus.

The report states in no uncertain terms that they, “consider this service inaccessible and unsafe to use for most Disabled people using non-standard cycles and do not consider it a viable way to cross the river.”

They go onto that that, “We consider this service unlikely to be accessible or safe to use for many Disabled people using standard bicycles, especially for people using heavier e-bikes or if carrying cargo (including additional mobility aids) or children.”

The opening of Silvertown highlights not only a Mayor seemingly intent on damaging his own Transport Strategy and plans by adding more motor traffic to east London, but also the absolute failure for TfL, the Mayor and London to talk, think and act strategically on crossings of the Thames.

London has been promised action on walking, wheeling & cycling routes across the river in east London for some time, none of which have materialised while the tunnel has, while in west London we can see the increasingly obvious reality of ageing crossings starting to fall apart.

There are real opportunities and threats London must face, but what will Sadiq do about this? So far, it’s Silvertown and bus…