Prudential Bike Road Closure Fail

[mybrainhurts]

swerni said:

mybrainhurts said:

whatleytom said:

Plenty of signs out in West London. Can't see what more organisers can do

They could have had the decency to die suddenly before organising the event.

oh dear the dimentia is bad this evening

God, you're good. You ought to do stand up.

[Digger]

mybrainhurts said:

swerni said:

mybrainhurts said:

whatleytom said:

Plenty of signs out in West London. Can't see what more organisers can do

They could have had the decency to die suddenly before organising the event.

oh dear the dimentia is bad this evening

God, you're good. You ought to do stand up.

Is dimentia like errr, the plural of dimension? I was just wondering. Or shall we just throw him into the Speeling thread!?

[mybrainhurts]

Digger said:

mybrainhurts said:

swerni said:

mybrainhurts said:

whatleytom said:

Plenty of signs out in West London. Can't see what more organisers can do

They could have had the decency to die suddenly before organising the event.

oh dear the dimentia is bad this evening

God, you're good. You ought to do stand up.

Is dimentia like errr, the plural of dimension? I was just wondering. Or shall we just throw him into the Speeling thread!?

He might inspire an iffy punctuation thread, too.

[964Cup]

Silver Smudger said:

The London Marathon road supervision is orders of magnitude better than this shower - And more well known I suspect

It's done by the same people, so that strikes me as unlikely. Possibly you failed to notice the many, many yellow signs saying "this road closed 2nd August - cycling event". I certainly noticed them as I cycled the route today. It is also the world's largest mass participation cycling event, with more than 26,000 participants, so disruption is unavoidable. How you failed to know it was happening this weekend is beyond me.

[yellowjack]

Clue for next year's event? Look for the absofookinlutely mahoosive yellow signs. They're everywhere. Heck, out in the countryside, there were even "notice of closure" signs where footpaths and bridleways crossed the route.

Unless you're driving around with your smartphone jammed in your face, you simply cannot feckin-well miss them. And in the built up areas, they're fixed to lampposts and at junctions and everything. Just, you know? Use your eyes and whatnot.

[Blaster72]

yellowjack said:

Clue for next year's event? Look for the absofookinlutely mahoosive yellow signs. They're everywhere. Heck, out in the countryside, there were even "notice of closure" signs where footpaths and bridleways crossed the route.

Unless you're driving around with your smartphone jammed in your face, you simply cannot feckin-well miss them. And in the built up areas, they're fixed to lampposts and at junctions and everything. Just, you know? Use your eyes and whatnot.

Can't you read? As I said earlier, no signs in my local area until the actual day when red Road Closed signs were plonked on the tarmac shutting off the only two river crossings in the area.

Just because they got it right where you live doesn't mean they did so everywhere. It's really not that hard to understand.

[Schmy]

Blaster72 said:

Can't you read? As I said earlier, no signs in my local area until the actual day when red Road Closed signs were plonked on the tarmac shutting off the only two river crossings in the area.

Nobody believes you I'm afraid.

For the fortnight before the ride it was impossible to approach London from any direction without passing several signs. Not noticing them isn't the same as them not being there. So which is more likely? That you and the OP are not very observant or that everyone except you else had signs and mail notifications?

[croyde]

Maybe approaching London but I live here and the only signs I saw was as they were closing the roads at around 5am as I headed for work.

As I have said before there were no signs advising where to go on my trip back around lunchtime.

Granted I was on a scooter so I managed to get through the grid lock but it was so bad I'd say that my 35 min journey would have taken at least 4 hours by car.

At least I knew which single bridge of around 10 that span the Thames from Blackfriars to Kingston was open.

[scubadude]

Silver Smudger said:

The London Marathon road supervision is orders of magnitude better than this shower - And more well known I suspect

Well,its the same organisers and they have a 5year license which looks likely to be extended so put a note in your diary for early August as its here to stay.

FWIW Have you considered the manpower required to close 100miles of roads through London? It makes closing 26miles look easy.

I rode this last year and the number of and enthusiasm of the marshals and staff manning road closures was amazing (considering that it rains hard the for 8hours solid in 2014) its not the people on the gates and signs fault if you have missed 3years of warnings and can't navigate in your own city.

Why not buy a bike and take part next year :-)

[The Mad Monk]

scubadude said:

Well,its the same organisers and they have a 5year license

I bet they haven't!!

[croyde]

Honest question. If I had cycled to work and back, would it have been possible to cross the route?

I scoured the website for this info but couldn't find it.

[yellowjack]

croyde said:

Honest question. If I had cycled to work and back, would it have been possible to cross the route?

I scoured the website for this info but couldn't find it.

Yes, there were a number of pedestrian crossing points. Signs put up overnight to warn the participants of location, and motorbike marshals to slow the cyclists, I think. There definitely was a video somewhere deep in the Prudential event website showing how vehicle crossings (for emergency services) and pedestrian crossings would be managed by the 'event safety team'. I found it by searching for the route, rather than the event info, as I rode the route after the closures were lifted (I didn't get an event place) and needed to know when the roads were re-opening to those of us not on the event.

[Kermit power]

jagracer said:

SixPotBelly said:

London is gridlocked because of cars. Cars almost invariably carrying just one person. They take up, what, nine times the road space that a bike does.

More people riding bikes rather than driving is a solution to London's congestion, not the cause of it.

And I'm speaking as a diehard petrolhead, not just a cyclist.

While I agree about the excess amount of cars on the road, I see line after line of trucks stuck in traffic heading into London daily and we can't manage without them at all. It's a bit of an exaggeration to say a car takes the space of nine bikes, more like two or maybe three. As for getting rid of the cars that commute into London, how would these people get to work, remove every car off the road in the rush hour and there wouldn't be the capacity on public transport, the trains are full to overflowing with no room to fit more trains on the tracks, add more buses and the roads would be even more gridlocked.

One thing I have noticed is that the councils and TFL are making pavements wider, corners tighter and squeezing all of of us into narrower and narrower roads, take Ruckholt road and Eastway by the park as one of many, the pavements and central reservation are far wider than the road and you never see a pedestrian, it's a recipe for disaster.

I'm speaking as one who has a nice bike and would like to cycle more but am too scared to do so, which reminds me I must fill out that witness statement for the prick in the white van that knocked a cyclist off her bike a few weeks ago.

I know not all Superhighways are the same, but I ride into town on CS7, which is in the existing bus lane for much of the route, and therefore not taking up any other space than the bus lane already did. Where it's not in the bus lane, it's because the existing road isn't wide enough to have a bus lane and a car lane anyway, so again the bikes aren't slowing anyone down.

One summer's morning a couple of years ago, I counted the number of cyclists at the traffic lights outside Oval tube station. There were over 40 of us, with more arriving when the lights changed to green. That's the one which seems to get busiest as it has the longest stop time, but it's a similar story at every set of lights from Clapham inwards. That's 40-50 cyclists in the space that would be taken by three cars! OK, they wouldn't be so densely packed in when moving, but because there are so many cars, half the cars are at a standstill at any given time anyway!!

With the exception of people who need to carry tools or product samples or whatever around with them (ie, a very small minority), I am utterly bemused as to why anyone in their right mind would choose to drive in to Central London at any time between 06:00 and midnight. If you took 80% of the cars off the roads, you could run ten times the number of buses and still leave more than enough room for all the trucks and bikes you like.

Getting back to the OP, though, it wouldn't have killed SouthWest Trains to lay on a few extra carriages on Saturday! They must've had at least 18 months' notice of the fact that there were going to be a hugely elevated number of bikes going into and out of Waterloo on Saturday, but they still ran 4 carriage services all day. Our carriage alone had 28 bikes in it coming out in the afternoon, which caused chaos! Surely it wouldn't have been beyond the bounds of common sense to run 8 carriage trains (especially given that the were all far fuller than the average middle of the day weekday train) and have signs on the platform saying which carriages to get in to? Leave a couple with no bikes, then get those with bikes sorted into carriages so you don't end up with the farcical situation of people having to try and pass bikes over other people's heads to get them out of the carriages!

[croyde]

That train thing is weird.

They run 8 and 12 car trains during the week which are empty outside of peak hours, yet reduce them to 4 cars at the weekend and they are packed with people going out for the day and doing the sensible thing of leaving their cars at home.

Packed to the point of being as uncomfortable as they are during the rush hour except the weekenders don't realise that you are supposed to keep quiet and not strike up conversations with strangers.

Oh and certainly no smiling and laughing

[Kermit power]

croyde said:

That train thing is weird.

They run 8 and 12 car trains during the week which are empty outside of peak hours, yet reduce them to 4 cars at the weekend and they are packed with people going out for the day and doing the sensible thing of leaving their cars at home.

Packed to the point of being as uncomfortable as they are during the rush hour except the weekenders don't realise that you are supposed to keep quiet and not strike up conversations with strangers.

Oh and certainly no smiling and laughing

People at Vauxhall certainly weren't smiling and laughing when a seemingly half empty carriage pulled up, only for them to be confronted with a tangle of metal which would've done the D-Day beaches proud when the doors opened!

It wasn't that long ago (certainly I remember them from the late 80s) that we could've just bunged all the bikes in the guard's van.

[Kell]

Silver Smudger said:

Dear Prudential Event organisers - Thank you so very fking much for completely screwing the east of London this morning - No bloody advance warning signs, diversions or leaflets, just shut the A12 and A13 completely in both directions - Manning the barriers with numpties with no fking clue about the plan, to direct traffic from their post straight into another closure - Close all but one lane of the Blackwall Tunnel as well, and don't bother with specifics on all the dot-matrix signs available on the motorways and A-roads that feed into the tunnel approach so we have no fking clue what is ahead, just the un-fking-helpful text - 'Cycle event road closures'.

Whose genius idea was it to not run several similar named events in different areas of London on the same fking weekend as well?! Prudential RideLondon FreeCycle, Prudential RideLondon Grand Prix, Prudential RideLondon-Surrey 100 and Prudential RideLondon-Surrey Classic !
Anyone who hears a rumour of something bike related can then find the wrong website really quickly and see a published route that is nowhere near their commute to work, and unwittingly sail into an utter st-fest of jams.

The last 1.7-mile section of my journey this morning was transformed into an 8-mile detour, clogged with bewildered drivers and thousands of cyclists, floundering about from one 'Road Closed' sign to the next, which took over an hour and a half - 3 hours later, the London-bound A13 is still queueing from Canning Town out past Dagenham...

I have had several staff that have abandoned their cars and travel in the last chunk of their journey into the office by Tube or DLR, so they were all late in as well, and now we can't get vans out to Central London because of the chaos in all the rat-runs around the main closures.

s!

You should have cycled.

[loudlashadjuster]

I live 25 miles from the RideLondon route at its closest point and even I knew there was an event on and to avoid the general area.

Local notifications signs, M25/M40/M4/M3/etc. matrix warnings, local and national TV coverage, newspapers, radio, recurrence every year since 2012...

Not sure what more you can expect the organisers to do to ensure you never get held up again so unjustly?

[Type R Tom]

There have been plenty of warning signs up, including the A2 as I use it every day. If I remember rightly, the large matrix after Sun in the Sands. I also assume people complaining don’t use social media because if you do (and drive into London) you should be following TFL traffic alerts.

I have this sort of thing all the time with my job, you can install signs, adverts in the papers, various social media and websites and people still claim not to be informed / consulted. Question is if you don’t read the paper or listen to the radio or use social media and you miss something, whose fault is it? Short of going door to door how else can you inform people.

[Blaster72]

Schmy said:

Blaster72 said:

Can't you read? As I said earlier, no signs in my local area until the actual day when red Road Closed signs were plonked on the tarmac shutting off the only two river crossings in the area.

Nobody believes you I'm afraid.

For the fortnight before the ride it was impossible to approach London from any direction without passing several signs. Not noticing them isn't the same as them not being there. So which is more likely? That you and the OP are not very observant or that everyone except you else had signs and mail notifications?

This thread would suggest otherwise, as I said again and again the organisation in my local area was woeful. Roads closed, no diversion routes, lots of traffic queueing and marshals who didn't have a clue.

I'm sure it was lovely for those taking part but they really can do better.

As for mail notifications - nope, nothing through the letter box at all. Matrix signs on the motorway just warned of cycling event in LONDON.

Maybe next year they'll make some changes, who knows. I don't really care that you believe everyone knew all about it just because you did.

[Type R Tom]

Blaster72 said:

This thread would suggest otherwise, as I said again and again the organisation in my local area was woeful. Roads closed, no diversion routes, lots of traffic queueing and marshals who didn't have a clue.

I'm sure it was lovely for those taking part but they really can do better.

As for mail notifications - nope, nothing through the letter box at all. Matrix signs on the motorway just warned of cycling event in LONDON.

Maybe next year they'll make some changes, who knows. I don't really care that you believe everyone knew all about it just because you did.

Do you realistically expect a diversion route for all of the closed roads? How would that work exactly considering there is a very good chance the diversion would be straight into another road closure!