Remember these?

These are the two new cross town cycle highways planned for London. One runs east-west along the Embankment; the other runs north-south along Farringdon Road (the maps expand if you click on them). They are, says the London Cycling Campaign (LCC), “Europe’s longest substantially segregated cycleways”.

Well, the good news is that, they’ve got the go-ahead from City Hall. There have been a few minor changes to the plans (a slight narrowing in some locations, that sort of thing), but nothing substantive, and construction will begin in March.

The bad news is that, within mere minutes of that announcement, this happened:

The London Taxi Drivers’ Association aren’t the only organisation whining about this particular decision. Consider this statement from Howard Dawber, spokesperson for the Canary Wharf Group property firm:

“Canary Wharf is calling for a trial period – like during the Olympics – so we can see how the scheme works in practice and make any necessary changes.”

How one can trial building a massive great cycle highway is not exactly clear. You either build it or you don’t. If you only build part of it, you’re not really trialling the thing at all. But anyway.

Both these statements are – let’s not kid ourselves about this – acts of naked self-interest. Cab drivers don’t want scarce space on key routes like these given over to cyclists, which would slow traffic and make expensive black cabs less attractive as a way of getting around the place. Similarly, if you own Canary Wharf, you’re probably gonna oppose any development that might slow traffic down on the main road route to Heathrow.

A judicial review can’t block the new cycle lanes forever: the courts are empowered to review the process by which decisions are made, but not the decisions themselves. The worst case scenario here is that Transport for London could be forced to go back to square one, and re-do their consultation process.

That’s unlikely to change public opinion. As the LCC notes:

There has been overwhelming support for the proposals… More than a hundred major businesses on or near the routes, including Unilever, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deloitte and Orange, also publicly backed the scheme, as did all parties on the London Assembly. Opinion polling showed that Londoners as a whole backed the scheme by 64 per cent to 28 per cent.

What a judicial review can do, though, is make the process of getting the cycle lanes built so horrible that London’s political leaders decide it isn’t worth the hassle. From here on, it’s a battle of willpower.

Still, the whole thing has given Uber’s London office a great chance to troll their arch-rivals in the black cab lobby: