Why London will Struggle to Become a Cycling City

Posted By Joe Peach

Jan 25th, 2011

Why London will Struggle to Become a Cycling City

This article was originally written for Next American City

Boris Johnson – London’s cycle-obsessed Mayor – has a serious case of Europe envy. Located just a few hundred miles away from the British capital are Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Copenhagen in Denmark – two cities with such a well-integrated approach to urban cycling that they respectively see 32% and 40% of all trips taken on bike. London, on the other hand, manages around 2%.

But people of London, worry you not. Boris is here with a plan to ‘change the urban landscape of the city’. A plan laced with ambitious statistics and cycles lanes so blindingly blue that it couldn’t possibly fail. Unfortunately for both the Mayor and the city’s inhabitants, this plan is not enough to turn London into a cycling city like that of our European neighbours.

Whilst Johnson has raised the profile of the London cyclist, his efforts are not the city’s first. Feeling positive about the future of the bicycle, the Borough of Ealing once said:

There are signs of change. Top managers and Council leaders are starting to understand the significance of cycling to their priorities.

This proclamation came in 1996, when Ealing saw only 1% of trips taken on bike. Now that 15 years have passed and the effects of changing attitudes in government should have been felt and acted upon, Ealing now sees an incredible… 1% of trips taken on bike.

The London Cycling Campaign have a five year plan entitled One in Five by 2025. The goal of this campaign is as clear as it is ambitious – 20% of trips taken by bike by the year 2025. Whilst one can’t help but wonder whether this title was chosen because it rhymed, the more important question is what is being done to achieve this goal?

Johnson has invested the majority of his £110 million cycling budget on two projects. A cycle hire scheme for the city and a network of 12 ‘cycle superhighways’ connecting outer boroughs with the city center. Familiar to some North Americans, London’s cycle hire is almost identical to Montreal’s Bixi apart from the fact that it operates all year round. It has also been similarly successful, but currently operates only within the city center- Zone 1 as it is known locally. Despite plans to extend eastwards in time for the 2012 Olympics, Johnson has acknowledged that the scheme will not be introduced to all boroughs.

This city-center focus is also evident in the ‘cycle superhighways’ – wide and often-separated bright blue lanes which connect the outer boroughs to London’s center. Two are currently active, with two more scheduled to open each summer until the clock-like network surrounding London is complete.

Prioritizing the central area – whilst understandable due to the vital role in plays in London’s economy – is going to cost the city as it attempts to become more cycle-friendly. Both Amsterdam and Copenhagen have been able to achieve high bicycle usage figures by making it part of everyday routine. Unless your life revolves around London’s city center, you cannot depend on the cycle hire scheme for everyday use. Similarly, if you don’t work in the center of London, the ‘cycle superhighways’ will be less practical.

In addition to this, London’s roads are not built for the needs of cyclists. Consistent cycle lanes are nothing but a dream, whereas frequent pot holes are a sad reality. Despite one-way roads in many European cities being bi-directional for cyclists, London is yet to embrace this simple change that would make cycling through the city so much easier.

However, even if all these issues were overcome, London would still struggle to become the cycling city its Mayor longs for. Both Copenhagen and Amsterdam are manageable cities with populations and geographies a fraction of London’s, making the task of creating a cycle-friendly city achievable. Combine the challenge of London’s size with its city-center focus and this city’s struggle to become a cycling city is easy to understand. With two-thirds of its population living in outer boroughs, but two-thirds of the city’s GDP coming from the city center, commuting to work is a reality for most Londoners. Factor in the size of the city and cycling becomes less practical.

Despite these problems, cycling will undoubtedly become more popular in London. In fact, since Johnson became the Mayor in 2008 it already has, no doubt assisted by recent infrastructure developments. However, the goal of 20% set by the London Cycling Campaign is still a long way off, and matching the 32% and 40% figures of Amsterdam and Copenhagen is nothing but a pipe-dream.

Britain can long for a capital city where cycling infrastructure is consistent and well-integrated, and its city-center obsession evolves, but this is unlikely. London’s train network and underground are built to ferry people form the outer areas into the city, and now the cycle superhighways do the same. Scheduled to open in 2017, the high-speed Crossrail service will soon connect those living even further out with London’s center. The culture of our transport network is built around the notion of bringing people in, and due to the permanence of transport infrastructure, this is unlikely to change.

In a city as big as London, there is little room for a bicycle.

Image courtesy of Gemma Bardsley on flickr

http://twitter.com/philiploy Philip Loy

This is why the focus is now on short local cycle trips, say up to 20 minutes, in the town centres of the Outer London Boroughs. To evoke the cliche, London can also be regarded as a vast collection of urban villages. Such short local trips in the suburbs are realistic because 35 per cent of journeys there would take less than 20 minutes to cycle, and two-thirds of these trips are made by car. But such trips also exist throughout the whole of Greater London, central areas included. It is these shorter trips, in addition to the regular commute, that means London can, with enough political will, achieve something approaching those other European capial cities.
http://www.pushbikewear.com Steve

Well in the years that I have been cycling in London, the number of other cyclists has grown considerably.
Anything the Mayor does to help is a good thing.
Jack Thurston

I don’t buy the argument that London is ‘too big’ to be a cycling city.

I think this lets off the hook the politicians and planners who need to do more in terms of hard infrastructure. You say “London’s roads are not built for the needs of cyclists”. True. But neither were Copenhagen’s roads built for the needs of cyclists until around 40 years ago when planners began a long process of transforming a car-dominated city into a city more inviting to walking and cycling.

I think the argument made in this article suffers from a flawed conception of London’s size. While everyone wants to be nice and inclusive towards the outer boroughs, London really needs to be regarded in terms of an urban core (Inner London, or zones 1-3). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_London This does not include Ealing, I’m sorry to say. Philip Loy makes the point about villages and it’s quite possible that the outer borough ‘doughnut of inaccessibility’ (fast, wide, car-dominated roads) can benefit from pro-cycling measures, but they are really quite separate functionally from central London.

Boroughs like Hackney are doing some excellent work on making the city more permeable to cyclists and less convenient for private vehicles. See Hackney’s excellent Public Realm policy http://www.hackney.gov.uk/public-realm-spd.htm

With more work along those lines, more hard infrastructure for cycling principally by removing car parking space to make way for separated cycle paths, it is quite possible for Inner London to become every bit the cycling city to compare with Copenhagen or Amsterdam. Whether it will happen, is up to our political leaders and planners, and that means ultimately, as their electors and employees, and as everyday cyclists, ourselves.

http://www.joepeach.co.uk Joe Peach

I don’t think that artificially redefining London’s boundaries is justifiable in making it seem like a cycling success. Sure, we can say you need to interpret London as a central urban core, but that doesn’t make London a central urban core. London is the size it is, and that is the city we should attempt to work with, even if it is a seemingly impossible challenge to do that.

Duncan Smith

There are some flawed arguments in this article. While I agree turning London into Copenhagen is a bit far fetched, there is certainly the potential for a several fold increase in bike trips. Anecdotally from living in Central London, cycle trips have at least doubled in the last five years which is a start.

On the ‘London is too big for cycling’ point, this doesn’t make sense. London’s geography and public transport system highlights the need to integrate cycling with public transport. Look at the bike parking at the rail stations in Amsterdam and Copenhagen- thousands and thousands of spaces, with excellent integration into the cycle network. Major terminals in London like Euston and Kings Cross are awful for cycling, facing on to a dual carriageway death-trap. Can I easily take a bike on a train/tube/tram/bus in the UK, or safely park a bike at a station long-term? Or course not.

Another argument made, that because London’s public transport system is radial and employment is focussed in the centre, therefore cycling is unsuitable, again doesn’t make sense. Cycling trips can also be radial and work well in high density environments as they take up little space. Incidentally over half of all travel in Greater London occurs between locations in Outer London, so the centre is not the only issue. Right now cyclists in Outer London are even more poorly catered for than Inner London as car infrastructure dominates.

Certainly London has many challenges in increasing bike use, particularly safety and the negotiating between the many demands for limited road space, but that’s no excuse for dismissing cycling based on flawed arguments.