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‘Pick up a bike’
• AS a “commuter” who uses Euston with the handy corner shop and cabbies’ café just around the corner in Eversholt Street I was interested to hear about the latest Euston redevelopment.
With colleagues in the London Cycling Campaign I have taken a great interest in how cycling can integrate with rail services, especially those to London termini. It is a fundamental fact that no rail service can deliver the door-to-door journeys made by practically every one of their passengers, and in absolute terms the only modes of travel to truly deliver in this way are walking and cycling.
Only a lucky few can literally step across the threshold from a car, bus or train.
Increasingly, those working in London realise this and for most destinations they enjoy the immediacy of picking up a bike with no waiting for the next bus or Tube train, and bypass traffic congestion with pleasant and quiet routes through back streets and parks, providing reliable and consistent journey times.
Euston has seen a growth in cycles parked and a headache of having the best route to get to the station with a bike via the bus station and piazza. Some cyclists avoid this conflict by riding up Melton Street, and Eversholt Street and climbing the steps, which really need to have wheeling ramps so that bikes can be rolled up rather than carried with the risk of toppling over or catching someone coming in the opposite direction. This would deliver an interim solution for the existing station, and develop a route to deliver cyclists to trains or cycle parking without the current, hard-to-police arrangements, in the new development.
When discussing the prospects for this “new Euston” let’s also press for the development to integrate with the fundamental modes of transport for connecting journeys, and have good walking and cycling connections to and through the site from the station throat, south right down to Euston Road, with better direct ways to Euston Square, King’s Cross/St Pancras and Camden Road, on foot or bike, to relieve the pressure on the Tube of many making that short one-stop journey to King’s Cross.
DAVE HOLLADAY
Address supplied
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