London. 42 years behind and counting. The revolution still hasn't started.

Two years have now passed since London's cycling "czar", Andrew Gilligan, told the world that his city was 40 years behind Amsterdam.

London's mayor, Boris Johnson, has now been in power for more time than it took to transform the entirety of the Netherlands for cycling, with no substantial progress occurring under his time in office. London's record on achieving press coverage is phenomenal. There has been a lot of noise made in London about cycling. Unfortunately, actual building of well-designed infrastructure is another thing altogether.

According to London's plans from two years ago, the peak year of expenditure is 2015. Yes, this is it. What does not get done in 2015 has less chance of being done later. This is the year when expenditure on cycling reaches its peak of £18 per person per year. That's about 2/3 of the usual Dutch level of expenditure. For the other years of the plan the expenditure level will be less than £10 per person per year, under 1/3 of the Dutch level. As I pointed out two years ago, the plans simply were not ambitious enough. London can never 'catch up' with the Netherlands by spending only a third as much for a limited period of time. Perhaps this is why the target in London is for a mere 5% of journeys to be made by bike.

A selection of proposals from last year
Sadly, proposals for new infrastructure in London remain inadequate. Here are a selection of those which I've seen over the last year.

Dangerous central cycle-lane leading into advanced stop boxes (including one in the fourth lane over). That's not cycling infrastructure, it's yet more paint.

How many lanes and places to cross ? Why ? This proposal was praised in some quarters as at least including some segregation of modes. What it actually does is demonstrate that the designers don't understand that bicycles are not the same as cars. Cyclists don't need extra traffic lights which apply only to them, they should be able to avoid traffic lights in order to make cycling journeys faster.

"Gobsmackingly bonkers". More ASLs, on-road lanes and the addition of a cycle-path which for some reason goes straight through the middle of a roundabout. Safe roundabouts for cyclists look entirely different to this idea.

The "cycle waiting bay". A bizarre idea. How many people actually want special places where they can wait beside the road before continuing their journey rather than infrastructure which allows them to complete their journeys both safely and efficiently ?

'Advanced' lights, on-road lanes, multi-colour cycling facilties, dangerous multi-stage turns.

Update May 2015: One that I'd missed which is so awful in design that it really must be listed here. A redesign for Queen's Circus Battersea roundabout which is actually under construction. In some places this has been described as "Dutch", but it's very far from any real design for a Dutch roundabout. This junction is also far too busy for a Dutch roundabout design so in the Netherlands this junction would in fact use traffic lights instead. As we can see form the photo, traffic lights are actually installed, so this won't flow freely like a roundabout. I'm assured that the cycling infrastructure under construction is actually narrower than that shown in the picture.
Update July 2015: Watch a video which demonstrates this roundabout in action. Enormously long delays for cyclists, combined with red jumping by drivers which puts cyclists in danger even after they've waited for a green light.

The ludicrous ideas

London's "Skycycle". It doesn't actually
exist of course and hopefully never will
because this is neither convenient nor
affordable.

Of course we've not only seen lacklustre plans like those above, but also completely preposterous ideas. Cycle paths were proposed both in the sky and below ground, both of course far more expensive and less convenient places to put cycling infrastructure than where sensible people have been requesting it - ground level.

But why stop there ? The Bounceway offered the intriguing idea of trampolining to work, backed by a grant from Transport for London to a company which went bankrupt shortly afterwards.

There was also a proposal for a bridge full of trees over the Thames which it may or may not be possible to cycle over. Update 2018: Note that this proposal, which consisted of almost nothing when I wrote the previous sentence, turned into the "Garden Bridge" project, which was cancelled without anything being built but through a fantastic degree of mismanagement still consumed 46 million pounds.

Discussing these things has wasted many hours of many peoples' time, detracting from focus on what the city should really be doing. It all demonstrates that London is still missing the big picture.

What London should really be doing
The lacklustre but serious proposals demonstrate that those working on road designs in London simply do not understand how to create good quality cycling infrastructure. The crazy ideas demonstrate something else: that those in charge don't know what to ask for.

What London needs to do now is exactly what the city has needed to do for the last 42 years:

Quietly get on with building a high quality grid of cycling routes to every destination and which absolutely everyone can use

Cycling doesn't need buzzwords. press releases, mocked up pictures which show inadequate plans or exaggerated claims. Cycling in London doesn't need people on the other side of the planet to be told about things that you might get around to doing in the future. Stop putting so much effort into trying to get good press and far too little into achieving results.

Length of headlines is far less important than length of cycle-path. The actual need of cyclists to be able to ride from wherever they live to wherever they need to go should not take a very poor second place to appearing to do the right thing to the world's press.

London has started to use the language of a grid, though they've misunderstood the intention. What is required is a very fine grid. To try again to make it clear, I'll explain how it is from my home in the Netherlands. I have to ride for just 30 seconds along 30 km/h residential streets with no through traffic (we live in a cul-de-sac - a design of street which naturally reduces through traffic) to reach either of two very high quality cycle-paths (this one and this one) which between them provide me with an efficient and safe route to every possible destination in the whole country. This is nothing special - it's normality in the Netherlands. What's more, the cycle-paths making up the majority of the grid are built to an extraordinarily high standard and maintaining the integrity of even small parts of the grid can require some surprisingly large works. This is what leads to the very high degree of subjective safety required to make cycling attractive to everyone.

Click here for details. We'd be very happy to
show TfL people what is actually required
in order to help to prevent them from making
further mistakes

Another concept which appears to have been misunderstood on its journey across the North Sea is that of unravelling of cycling routes from driving routes. London's "Quietways" are implied to mean something similar, but the emphasis is completely wrong. Rather than cyclists having direct main routes, they are given back streets. What's more, London's "Quietways" cannot even be expected to be quiet. This simply isn't good enough to effect mass cycling.

Where cycle-paths cannot be fitted along narrow streets, unravelling removes motor traffic so that even the youngest of cyclists can get right to their destinations in the Netherlands.

We'd like to help London to do the right thing, but this is only possible if the city will let us help.

Where the money goes
2015 is to be the peak year for investment in cycling in London. However this doesn't mean that the figure of "£18 per head" allocated only for this year can be spent on new infrastructure projects in the city. It can't be spent in that way because their are already many other things for which the funds have been pre-allocated. One of the largest sinks for money is the public bike hire scheme in London.

I visited London just over a year ago
Cyclists still look like this and there
are good reasons why that is so.

London is building public fountains rather than providing running water to every home. One of those "fountains" is the bike share system. I've been pointing out why bike share systems are not really a solution for mass cycling since 2009.

Five years ago we discovered that London's hire bikes had already cost £23000 per bike, making them the most expensive bikes in the world. Operating costs for the system remain very high at around £24 M per year. This figure is around 1/6th of the total funding available for the peak year of 2015 and more than 1/3rd of that for other years, greatly reducing how much money is left over to spend on infrastructure which could enable everyone to cycle.

Londoners owned more than a million bikes before the bike hire scheme started. A lack of bicycles was never the reason and is still not the reason why so few journeys are made by bicycle in London. The problem was and remains a lack of truly safe places to ride a bike.

Does London have unique journeys ?

Londoners use their cars for almost
 exactly the same purposes as the Dutch
use their bicycles

People often imagine that their own cities have problems which don't exist in the Netherlands and that this makes it more difficult to accommodate cycling. That really does not apply to London. Londoners makes the same journeys as Dutch people, both by length of journey and for purpose. However rather than making these journeys by bicycle, Londoners use other means including the car.

Attractive, safe, go-everywhere cycling
infrastructure is missing from London

Travelling by bicycle is not attractive in London now because of the conditions which people face on the streets of the city scare the masses away. We already know how to attract everyone to cycling.

There's a very good working example of what truly works a few kilometres to the East of London and I'm very happy to demonstrate it to anyone who is interested.

It's important to stop over-selling what London has done
Unfortunately, the over-selling of London doesn't only affect the UK. Hype from London spreads around the world. This leads to people in such places as Tokyo and Belgium seeing London as an inspiration - and therefore looking most firmly in the wrong direction rather than seeking to emulate best practice.

New funding announcement
Some readers may be aware that the British government announced extra funding for cycling two days ago. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, the extra funding announced is far too low a figure to make a real difference. In order to match the Dutch level of expenditure, the UK needs to spend more than £2 Billion pounds per year on cycling, but all that has been promised is £114 milion spread across four years and only available to be spent in some areas of the country.

How the DfT illustrates their funding
claim. It's a long way from what Dutch
children look like when they cycle.

The latest announcement follows a familiar pattern by using big and impressive sounding numbers in a way that may well confuse readers so that they think that cycling is being funded well. In reality even the largest number in the announcement ("This brought the total investment in cycling by this government to £588 million") reveals a paucity of ambition. That £588 Million spread across the five year life of the present government leaves us with British government funding for cycling which is still at a rate which is only around 1/16th of that required to match Dutch levels of expenditure. This level of funding does not represent an improvement over the early 1990s when cycle funding already hovered around one pound per person per year.

Read more about the Deputy Prime
Minister's cycling revolution.

The Deputy Prime Minister claims that Britain is "in the midst of a cycling revolution". This is the sort of language which we have heard many times before, and also claims that "this money can help Britain become a cycling nation to rival the likes of Denmark and the Netherlands". It's simply not possible for Britain to begin to rival countries which are decades ahead in cycling until the government takes cycling seriously. Far from proving that the government has begun to do that, this announcement actually proves that cycling is still not being taken seriously in the UK so we should expect a continuation of cycling at a rate of around 1-2% of journeys.

You can't catch up by running slower than the people who are ahead of you. The UK's cycling decline took decades of under-investment and to make cycling normal once again requires decades of a high level of investment.

Britain last week
I was in Britain last week to visit family. While there, Sustrans called on people to celebrate 20 years of the National Cycle Network so I dutifully borrowed a bike to ride along roads which are far busier than they should be in such a small town in order to take photos.

NCN 33 wiggle onto a muddy beach.
If the tide is in, what then ?, swim ?
We're supposed to #celebrate20 this ?

What passes for the National Cycle Network in this part of the UK consists of several signs threatening a £500 fine to anyone who dared to ride on a wide pavement to avoid the traffic, followed by a very small and out of the way sign telling people to ride on the pavement for a short distance, and then an inconvenient wiggle down onto a beach which has mud so sticky that one of the world's very few hovercraft rescue services was established in the area to pull people out of it.

Celebrate what, precisely ? This is not the efficient go-everywhere cycling infrastructure required to get the masses to see cycling as convenient.

I also visited a new housing development which was repeating the same mistakes as other new developments in the UK. i.e.it was designed only for cars, but with the twist of providing so little space for cars that there's nowhere to park them but over the pavements. In order to convince people to use alternatives to driving, the alternative must be realistic. Carrots work better than sticks.

The same mistakes are being repeated time and time again in the UK.

Update March 22 2015
London has "quietly" abandoned the target of a 5% modal share for cycling by 2026, leaving no real target for growth at all. It's perhaps worth reflecting on what I wrote about this target two years ago:

'setting a target of only around 5% of journeys by bike is not very ambitious at all. Nowhere in the Netherlands has such a low modal share and Britain has been promised more than this before. The lack of a serious target shows that this is not a real attempt to "catch up".'

Now that even that lacklustre target has been abandoned, what now for London ?

The video below shows current cycling conditions in London. For three seconds starting at 1:06 you can actually see a brand new cycle-lane which was opened just a few days ago. Yes, it lasts just three seconds on the video. A 5% cycling modal share will remain beyond London until there are real changes to the infrastructure. No quantity of press releases and no amount of training will ever cause the population as a whole to cycle on streets which look like this:



Update July 2015
Andrew Gilligan has used the spectre of "fending off" myself and other "people like that" as an excuse not to be available to the public on social media, particularly through Twitter.

Readers may remember that I've actually offered to help London on many occasions. Invitations were first sent in 2005 before our first study tour in 2006. They were sent again, to Boris Johnson, in 2008. Since that time I've offered study tours free of charge to Boris Johnson on two occasions: Once in 2011 and then again in 2013. Note that only the second offer dates to the first offer dates back to well before Andrew Gilligan started work in London. The second free invitation was extended to him as well as to his boss, Boris Johnson.

I don't offer to work for free for no reason. I did so because I genuinely wanted to help and I did not want the cost of the tour to be in any way a reason for London not to send representatives.

We have still had no official contact with either Andrew Gilligan or Boris Johnson. Not even a proper acknowledgment of our invitation having been received. It is disappointing that Andrew prefers to try to discredit me by slighting me as he did at the Hackney Cycling Conference rather than engage with me and my genuine attempt to help London's authorities to improve conditions for the people who live in the city.

As I pointed out over a year ago, London's (and the UK in general's) lack of interest in tackling cycling is killing people. People die every day, either from their lack of exercise due to driving or from the danger on the roads due to traffic. It's an ongoing emergency situation.

My postal vote for the UK to remain in the EU was
posted a few days ago - with a bicycle stamp upon it ;-)
Sadly, this was sent to me so late that it was probably not
counted, so I could not help the country avoid catastrophe.

Update June 2016
Boris Johnson is no longer the mayor of London. He is now leading a campaign for the UK to leave the EU and he has ambitions to become the prime minister of the UK. Please remember that this is the same BJ who was "fired from The Times in 1988 for fabricating a quotation" and who made his name by taking an extreme euro-skeptic position, inventing many of the ridiculous myths about the EU which have since been comprehensively busted.

Note: Most of the invitations which I've sent to London were sent before Andrew Gilligan started working at the city in 2013 and before I joined Twitter in 2011. The idea that Andrew Gilligan should particularly be concerned that I'd contact him through Twitter is patently absurd.

Another year without progress in London. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated ?

On the 4th of March 2013, Andrew Gilligan wrote of his and Boris Johnson's "ambitions for the bike". He set the scene for what was to follow by claiming that "it took 40 years to turn even Amsterdam into Amsterdam".

Today is the 4th of March 2014. London has not made any discernible progress towards becoming a proper cycling city in the last 365 days, so as of today, the automated counter on the right (code to embed it on your website or blog is produced by clicking on "embed this") has updated itself to report than the UK is now 41 years and zero days behind.

It may seem a little harsh to use Andrew's "40 years" statement in this way, but I'm very bored indeed of hearing this very well worn excuse for inaction. It was about twenty years ago when I heard "we're n years behind" being used to excuse the UK's bad cycling environment. At that time, those people who said this could only claim that the Netherlands had a twenty year head-start. The only change since then has been in the number of years by which people admit to being behind. While the Netherlands has continued to progress rapidly, the UK has continued to stagnate. The gap can only get bigger while the UK does not progress.

Can progress be made in less than 41 years ?
Before the UK was even just "twenty years behind", this video was produced in the Netherlands to demonstrate what had already been achieved:


Yes it's dated and much of what is shown is no longer to current Dutch standards, but look at what had been achieved in just 17 years in the Netherlands. Britain could have started to copy from this film 24 years ago. i.e. the UK could easily now look better than the Netherlands did when this video was made, but it doesn't.
I apologise if you think you've seen this before. You may well have done, perhaps on a study tour, or it could have been in an earlier post on this blog as this is the third time it's been featured here. The video shows the impressive result of just the first 17 years of work since policy changes in the 1970s in the Netherlands. I first wrote a blog post featuring this video six years ago. Back then, Britain was only "35 years behind the Netherlands", but unfortunately nothing of any substance has been achieved in Britain in those six years.

Actually, progress can be made in less than ten years
After the Netherlands changed its policies on cycling in the 1970s, it took just eight years until the country was impressive enough that New Scientist magazine ran an article about what had been achieved. In eight years, the Netherlands had already achieved more than London has managed when given those same eight years plus an extra 33 years which followed after the wake-up call from New Scientist.

To reach the point where the Netherlands was worth taking notice of took barely more than the six years between when I first posted the video above and the present day. It actually took less time than Boris Johnson has already been mayor of London (he has had this position since December 2005).

Not standing still vs. Same as it ever was
Even now, when they are "41 years ahead", the Netherlands is not standing still. We have seen rapid progress here in the last six years, making the infrastructure in the video look even more out of date now than it did when I first embedded it. Meanwhile, Britain has not progressed in any meaningful way in that time.

Dutch infrastructure has changed enormously since the 1970s while Britain's still looks very much as it did in the 1960s.

Cycling was in decline in both Britain and the Netherlands until the mid 1970s. It took a second revolution in Dutch street planning to reverse the decline here. As yet, that second revolution has still not taken place in Britain.

Back to London
This post started by referring to Andrew Gilligan's claim last year of London being 40 years behind. He said this in order to pave the way for the introduction four days later of plans which were supposed to make London "compete with Amsterdam". The level of hype was immense. After reading the plans I was immediately critical because it was very obvious that these plans could never achieve the stated aims. The document was long, the language was slick, and it alluded to things "Dutch". However, all that was really being offered were a few minor changes around the edges which could never achieve the stated goal. London appeared to think that it could "catch up" by spending "a third of as much as the Dutch and to do so for just ten years". Nowhere was it proposed to create the extensive grid of high quality go everywhere facilities necessary to result in a high cycling modal share.

London has has continued to borrow the names of things Dutch to describe infrastructure of far from adequate quality. Schrödinger's Cat pointed out that London had begun to use the word "grid" to describe a much lesser quality network of routes and that  "the plans are already failing to live up to the promises made" (I introduced the term "grid" to describe this important feature of Dutch infrastructure in 2008).

I visited London myself last year and was extremely disappointed with what I found. Nothing had changed for the better for cyclists. While there's a lot of hot air about cycling, there is no "cycling revolution". It's clear from their lacklustre and old-fashioned proposals that TfL still doesn't really have much of a clue what they are doing for cyclists. London actually took some small steps in the early 1980s, and had they continued then the city might have been transformed. Unfortunately, instead of continuing along this path, it was abandoned. The city still does not have infrastructure of the quality required to make it a truly pleasant and safe place to cycle.

We now know that Londoners' journeys are not different in length or purpose to journeys made by their Dutch counterparts, but cycling in London remains something that most people wouldn't consider. It's an activity for those who are either brave enough to accept the challenge, hard-up enough that they have no choice, or who are somewhere on a spectrum between those two extremes.

When there was a string of fatalities last year, Boris Johnson and Andrew Gilligan blamed cyclists rather than acknowledge the inaction of themselves and those who came before them had led to cycling being inherently dangerous as well as unpleasant in the city.

More recently, London's mayor has said that he still thinks properly designed cycling infrastructure is "totally pointless".

These people are not working for cycling and we should not let them get away with pretending that they are.

London's horrible plan for Kings X.
ASLs, on-road cycle-lanes, badly
designed crossings. TfL - have you
learnt nothing ? Come and find out
about real cycling infra. (source)

Yet more press releases
Perhaps in an attempt to forestall the inevitable criticism which would follow from having achieved nothing of substance over the last year, London has been sending out yet more press releases. These have been reported far and wide, including here in the Netherlands.

The new publicity appears to have done its job. Campaigners have almost completely forgotten about the promises made but never fulfilled last March because they're looking instead at the latest promises. Once again, it's "jam tomorrow". Once again, many campaigners are being tricked into thinking that the promise will come true.

The new announcements are actually even more lacklustre than last year. Rather than promising that the whole city will be transformed to "compete with Amsterdam", they're now promising only to transform 33 junctions. This isn't even new. It's a recycled version of the "junction review" which was promised to Londoners two years ago. To put the proposal in context, 33 junctions are to be reviewed out of thousands of road junctions in London. Even the proposals for these junctions have led to criticism because the proposals are lacklustre.

Even if London does manage to deliver what has been promised, the city will still fail to deliver what is needed because the promises made in the last week are so lacking in scope.

This has not stopped the London Cycling Campaign from adding to the hype. On the day of TfL's press release, LCC sent out two press releases of their own which praised the promises from TfL. They "congratulate the mayor" and talk about "success for campaigners".

But when the city's mayor has has done so little for cyclists and he also so recently made it clear that he doesn't understand what is needed, what are campaigners cheering about. This is not a time for praise, it's a time for sensible consideration of what is, or perhaps what is not, on offer from London's Mayor, Cycling Commissioner and TfL.

Cycling in London needs action, not words. It needs real campaigning and not mutual back patting, and will benefit greatly if campaigners can somehow forget about their amnesia, remember how things have not turned out according to press releases in the past and try to make sure that this situation doesn't continue. That promises made to cyclists are always about tomorrow is the reason why Britain is 41 years behind.

An ongoing emergency situation

The Dutch do the most moderate exercise in Europe. The
British almost the least. Source @Jono_Kenyon

This is an ongoing emergency. Change is needed urgently. In London and in Britain as a whole, cycling is something that most people simply never do and this lack of cycling kills people.

The health of the average Dutch adult benefits from having the best chance in Europe to incorporate a little healthy exercise into their daily lives by cycling. Meanwhile, British adults are near the bottom of the list.

Dutch children have enormous freedom and are considered by UNICEF to have the best well-being in the world, while British children are at the bottom of the list.

Campaigners and government alike have produced manifestos, reports and any amount of hot air in Britain for decades and they still continue to do so. None of that will get people cycling. Nor will more cycle training. To get people cycling you need infrastructural change, and you need that infrastructure to be of the best quality possible.

Get building
Britain needs to start planning and building that high quality infrastructure. Stop writing press releases and get on with actually doing something. Don't delay. Start now. Having sat back for 41 years already, time is of the essence.

Cost is not an issue. It's cheaper to build cycling infrastructure than not to build it.

Time is not an issue either. As this video proves, when Britain actually wants to build infrastructure, it can be done quickly - so long as its a project that the government is genuinely behind:

Think rapid progress isn't possible in the UK ? Watch this video which demonstrates how much can be achieved in little time when the British government has found a project that it really wants to support: "The entire 55 miles of dual carriageway,  132 bridges and 92 concrete culverts are due to be completed within 19 months". Everyone involved was "inspired with a sense of urgency". "After only 16 weeks of construction, the record of progress was remarkable". In the Netherlands, cycling projects are built with a similar urgency. Speed is essential when rapid progress takes place over many years. To build Britain's motorway network, many big things had to be done as well as small things like changing laws and moving kerb lines - the sort of small problems seemingly regarded as insurmountable obstacles when it comes to cycling infrastructure.

I pose again a question from last year: How much time do you think you have ? At the current sub-glacial rate of change, no significant improvements can be expected for British cyclists within the life-spans of anyone campaigning now.

Click here for more information

Having low aspirations will never result in the change that is required. Come and find out how to do a proper job. Take what you learn back to the UK. We can show you how to make cycling accessible to everyone so that everyone wants to cycle.

We're here to help, but we can only help those who actually want to be helped.

The hype continues. London's "smart" pedestrian crossings.
In the week after this blog post, London achieved considerable publicity yet again (not only within the UK but also extending to the Netherlands) for plans to trial a new pedestrian crossing innovation which is claimed to improve conditions for pedestrians. In fact, crossing the road in London is a harrowing experience (as I demonstrated last year). In recent years, pedestrian green times have been shortened and shortened again, and the number of pedestrian crossings in London has also been reduced, making pedestrians' journeys longer if they wish to use a pedestrian crossing to get across the road in relative safety, or their crossing more dangerous if they do not.

What's more, London uses the concept of a countdown timer on pedestrian crossings to tell people to run faster because its not long until motorists will be given a green light, while in the Netherlands it's used to demonstrate that the delay before we can cross the road will be short so there is no need to hurry across, possibly in danger.

While on the subject of delays before crossing, these can be extraordinarily long in London compared with what I'm used to in the Netherlands. We have a maximum delay of 8 seconds for pedestrians and cyclists at many of our crossings.

However, while London is achieving press around the world, including here in the Netherlands, for its "innovation", almost no-one knows that the experience for pedestrians is in fact far better in this country than it is in the UK.

Not only Britain's cyclists but also Britain's pedestrians would do a lot better if more effort was put into actually achieving a good environment rather than simply writing press releases.

British campaigners: here's a message from the 1970s which is especially pertinent to the current situation for cyclists in the UK.

London's cyclists are not to blame for London's low cycling modal share, it's the politicians who should take the blame

Low cycling nations and low cycling cities don't have a problem with how well cycling is marketed, they have a problem with how well their infrastructure works for cycling.

Six Londoners died in a short period of time recently and this has been followed by protests including a "Die In".

Neither London's Mayor, Boris Johnson nor the Cycling Commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, appear to be aware of their role in what has happened. Both have made remarks on the lines of that there is nothing they could do by changing infrastructure which would reduce the incidence of deaths. They are  deliberately misleading people and the people they are misleading most are those who voted them.

Cycle-paths are one of the forms of
infrastructure which keep Dutch
cyclists safe.

Here in the Netherlands we have infrastructure which reduces the incidence of cyclist deaths. We used it every day. I've offered my time twice to the Mayor in order to demonstrate what it is and how it works, but it would seem that he's not very interested in knowing what he needs to do to keep cyclists safe.

Yesterday evening I watched a news programme from the UK in which Andrew Gilligan blamed cycling campaigners for making cycling look dangerous. He suggested that cyclists making cycling sound dangerous this was the reason why a BBC survey revealed that a fifth of London's cycle commuters have stopped cycling. Yes, he actually laid blame on the people who promote cycling. This is a disgraceful distortion of what is actually happening under his watch.

Back in March, just after Boris Johnson appointed his friend as cycling commissioner, I was skeptical of their motives and suggested that this was a time when campaigners would need to become more busy than before. It was clear then that London would rely on hype, exaggeration and marketing rather than actually building the infrastructure that was required to make change happen. I gave he post the tag "broken promises" because even as they made their promises, it was obvious that they would be broken. Nothing that has happened in London since that time reduces my skepticism.

It's possible to ride for six years without incident
A few days back I realised that while up to six years ago I had quite regular unpleasant experiences when cycling, I'd now had six years of having no unpleasant experiences at all, not having been cut up even once, until that run of six years was broken just one month ago. What is special about six years ? Six years ago we emigrated from the UK and we've lived in the Netherlands since that time. Why one month ? One month ago I rode a bike for just a few hours in London and it reminded me what it is like to ride a bike in the UK.

Why isn't it like this for everyone ?
In order to encourage people to ride bicycles, the choice of doing so has to be made easy. Routes taken by bicycle need to be direct, they need to be as free as possible of stops, and the conditions need to be and to feel very safe. Unless cycling is subjectively safe, most of the population will never cycle.

The best way of improving both actual safety and subjective safety is to do one simple thing: remove motor vehicles from the spaces where cyclists ride.

The BBC's survey revealed a fifth of cyclists had been involved in a collision. This is not just a problem with subjective safety, but of whether people are injured or die when cycling. It's not a marketing problem which can be solved by not talking about dying, it's a problem with the experience that people have if they get on a bicycle, which in London is always tense.

Two-thirds of London cyclists admit they sometimes ride on pavements to avoid busy junctions. They do this not because it's convenient (it's not) but because it feels safer than continuing their journey on the road. To solve problems like this we first have to understand them.

London cyclists don't dress like this
because it's fashionable but because
they are scared

In one of my very first posts on this blog, more than five years ago, I noted that "Cyclists are the pit-canaries of the roads. If they're numerous, dressed in ordinary clothing and wide-ranging in age you can tell that you are in a location where cycling is "normal" in society and where it is safe enough, and feels subjectively safe enough, that everyone cycles. If people feel they have to dress to be safe then this is a sign that they do not have adequate subjective safety."

London's cyclists still look very much like the pit canaries of the road and there are good reasons why. If you cycle in London then you have to be concerned about your own safety. The BBC survey included several questions about subjective safety. For instance, one question asked whether people thought their family and friends were safe when cycling. Nearly 70% said no. The low subjective safety is why people wear bright colours, helmets and face masks. These are not fashion accessories, they're tools for survival. They're not worn because someone said it was unsafe, they're worn because people feel unsafe when cycling.

Until London gets to grips with why people feel unsafe when cycling and until the city starts to do something about the reasons why people feel unsafe by building infrastructure makes cycling attractive to everyone, the city will not see a rise in cycling to levels comparable with the Netherlands.

Cycling in London doesn't need marketing, it needs infrastructure !

The same principles apply everywhere
Any place which has given inadequate attention to making cycling safe, convenient and enjoyable will see stagnation at a low percentage of journeys by bike as only people who particularly like cycling will ride bikes.

Journeys by bike in London never broke through even 5% of the total. Sadly, this decline has occurred before the city has even done one percent of what it needed to do to make mass cycling happen in the first place. However, declines can happen anywhere and examples of it happening should be a warning to us all.

It's not only London which has seen cyclists give up. Once mighty Denmark has unfortunately also seen the equivalent of one in eight cyclists give up. This decline came about for the same reasons as the decline in London. They ignored the importance of building good enough infrastructure and tried to use marketing to fill in the gaps. Voluminous international publicity turned out not to be enough to make people feel safe when they experienced problems on a daily basis such as junction designs which cause conflict and have killed seven Copenhageners already this year. While it may still seem a step beyond what many nations have, to copy Denmark's "success" actually means to copy what doesn't work in Denmark. That's why I suggest that the Netherlands remains easily the best country to try to emulate.

While the Netherlands is currently on top that doesn't mean that this country is any more immune to these issues than any other. Plenty of Dutch people take what they have for granted and simply don't know why it is that they cycle. Denmark should especially serve as a warning to the Netherlands as policies and practices from there and marketed to this country could reasonably be expected to end with the same result here as they did where they came from.

The Dutch don't cycle because it's "in their blood" but for the same reasons as anyone else would cycle given conditions which made cycling into an easy option to choose. When cycling is convenient, offers direct and uninterrupted journeys and both feels and is safe then people choose to cycle. When conditions are merely adequate and when incidents happen often enough that people remember them and become concerned about their safety, cycling will stagnate or drop.

Not all Dutch cities grow cycling at the same rate. Here, just like everywhere else, people cycle in response to infrastructure and not in response to marketing.

Hope for the future
Cycling needs actions, not words. A million volumes of marketing material do not have the same value as one metre of good quality cycle-path, and that's universally true. To a first approximation, cycling modal share is proportional to expenditure. Politicians control the funds and they need to release them in order that cycling can grow, not make excuses for inaction or blame cyclists for their own misfortune.

The Netherlands achieved its cycling success by building a remarkable country-wide network of world class infrastructure and not by marketing. Other countries could achieve the same results in the same way. There is no proven alternative method which leads to true mass cycling.

Update 6 December 2013
Usage of London's bike share system is also falling. This is also being blamed on cyclists. When I was in London a few weeks ago I tried the system and found it to work well enough as a civil amenity. However, I also cautioned that it's not cycling infrastructure.

For four and a half years I've been writing about the limits of London's bike share system and how it can never lead to a real cycling "revolution" in the city. Bike share answers the wrong question. London's problem was never a shortage of bicycles, but was always a shortage of pleasant conditions for cycling.

London's aim should be to become a city of ten million cyclists. This will never happen while instead of fixing the infrastructure, London's politicians seek to pass the blame for the majority of the population being scared to cycle onto the few people brave enough to do it.

The Campaign for Childhood Freedom. This is your "stop the child murder" moment (see what happens when Londoners have children)

Earlier today I wrote a blog post about how Londoners use cars for exactly the same journeys as the Dutch use bikes. However, there was more than just that in Transport for London's data and at least one thing which I thought much more important: How people behave when they have children.

What happens when Londoners have children ?

UNICEF Index of child
well-being. High cycling
countries in orange.

TfL say that "Car trip rates are consistently around 50 per cent higher amongst residents of households with at least one child than those living in childless households across all income bands. Averaged across all income bands, adults in households with children make 0.93 car driver trips a day on average, compared to 0.58 car driver trips per person in households without children."

They go on to say that "Parents of pre-school and primary school aged children have the highest car driver trip rates, and young adult households by far the lowest car driver trip rates."

It may be difficult for campaigners to see why, but this is evidence, as if we needed it, that Londoners care about their children. Being cocooned in a car is bad for children, but parents in London see see driving as the least bad option to try to keep their children safe.

It's not just London, it's everywhere
Parents across the world are united by a desire for their children to be safe. Every parent wants the best for their children, however while Dutch children benefit from an environment in which their parents can give them great freedom and which UNICEF says gives them the best wellbeing of any children, their British counterparts are rate second from bottom (only the USA is worse) in well-being, have less freedom than in the past and are cocooned in their parents' cars because of fear for their safety. This isn't only bad for the development of children but also for parents who have the added stress and expense of having to work as unpaid taxi drivers.

Children across most of the world share the same problems of lack of independence and this is a large part of the reason for the obesity 'epidemic' which leads to many calls or action. Nearly half of Britain's children are not getting the bare minimum of daily exercise needed for good health. It's similar in many other countries. Sadly, the solutions proposed often do not include the idea of allowing children the freedom that they crave because people can't see how that can be achieved.

Very young child cycling home from school on a normal
day in Assen. When she's a few years older she'll do it
without her Mum. Who doesn't want such freedom for
their children ? (this photo was not taken in a park but
in a very typical modern Dutch residential area)

I do not criticise parents in London or elsewhere because they want to keep their children safe. I also cannot criticise them for attempting to do so by driving them to their destinations in the family car rather than allowing their children to make their own way on a bicycle. Parents who do this are sacrificing their own time to benefit their children. Driving their children is an act of love.

The harm caused to children as a result of this is not the result of decisions made by individual parents who have no choice but to react to their environment so much as it is the inevitable result of decades of road design which has made cycling and also walking less than desirable, even on many residential streets.

Where's Boris ?
In London the fault lies with Transport for London and the buck stops with Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who for all his flannel about cycling has done almost nothing at all to make it possible for the majority of the population, and particularly for children, to travel independently instead of having to rely on their parents.

Events on closed roads demonstrate how popular cycling could be in London if only people felt safe to ride their bikes. But people do not feel safe and they will not cycle until they do. The standard of infrastructure in London is so poor than even most adults do not cycle now. Just 2% of journeys are by bike. In order for children to be able to cycle, the infrastructure needs to be far better as not only do The degree of subjective safety required to encourage parents to allow their children to have freedom.

A month has now passed since we invited Boris Johnson and other London politicians to come and see what it is that makes it possible for Dutch people to cycle as much as they do and to see for himself how Dutch children benefit from their freedom.

Since we sent our invitation, Boris Johnson has got himself into the paper again, this time cycling in Australia. Australias has similar problems with childhood obesity and lack of children's independence and social development to those of the UK. But what good is this doing for Britain ? How does this help the children of London, the UK, or Australia for that matter ?

Campaigners. It's time for effective action !
There's an opportunity for cycling campaigners if they wish to take it.

The rear window of our somewhat old
car displays a faded sticker left over
from a previous ineffective attempt
to improve conditions by asking for
"space for cycling"

Forget about ineffective campaigning for things like "space for cycling" (it may as well be "help the shoplifters" so far as the general public are concerned). Stop antagonizing people by talking about controversial but not particularly important issues like strict liability. Stop expending effort in debating the pros and cons of a single street in London which has been inadequately transformed for the second time. None of this is going to make cycling into an everyday experience for the whole population.

By concentrating on these details you are missing the big picture.

We moved here so that our children could have the same
advantages as do Dutch children. It's not something everyone
can do. We have campaigned for children from the start on
this blog. This is what "Go Dutch" should have been about!
Sadly, that campaign in London was derailed from the start.
This photo is of our children, now adults, on holiday in the
Netherlands next to the "cycling lesson" statue in Groningen

Cycling should be for everyone

Campaigners are partly to blame for the UK's disastrous last forty years because they've consistently failed to focus on the issues that really matter and have instead concentrated only on what existing cyclists needed to continue as a minority. Partly as a result of this emphasis, cyclists certainly are a minority now. By allowing themselves to be pigeon-holed as "the cyclists", and by setting their own standards so low, campaigners made it easier for government to get away with decades of under-investment in cycling infrastructure which could have benefited everyone.

Slowly, but oh so surely, the policies of successive governments have led to Britain's parents believing they have no choice but to transport their children by car. Parents want only the best for their children, but their choices are limited by the environment. This is why both walking and cycling to school have declined while driving to school has risen.

Parents are doing the best they can for their children, but while they keep their children safe from being killed in collisions on the streets by transporting them by car, those same cars will still kill them just as surely if they lead to a sedentary lifestyle and the resulting health issues.

This is your "Stop The Child Murder" moment. The best issue to campaign on now in the UK is the same issue as the Dutch campaigned on forty years ago: The safety and health of all the nation's children.

The Campaign for Childhood Freedom (links removed because domain abandoned)
A good slogan is needed for a campaign which is focused around children. "Stop The Child Murder" worked because it was emotive and was something that the whole population could get behind. The Campaign for Childhood Freedom also seeks the widest possible support. The health of future generations is vitally important, everyday exercise is vital to improving the health of children, and the best way of achieving this is to make it possible for every child to be active in their daily life and have a degree of freedom and independence similar to that which Dutch children benefit from.

For how many adults is the memory of their first bicycle also a memory of the freedom and independence which it provided ?

Children don't have driving licenses. If they are not to be cocooned in motor vehicles then there is a choice of travelling no further than walking distance or of experiencing the vastly greater degree of freedom which a bicycle provides.

To enable today's children to have the same experiences as their parents and grandparents requires a change to the infrastructure so that they are safe. Cycling infrastructure must be of a quality that you would let a five year old use it and it must go everywhere. Not only to school, but to beaches, parks, city centres and anywhere else that children might want to go.

Visit the website of
The Campaign for Childhood Freedom

There's no need to alienate the audience with anti-car policies. The Dutch don't. However, streets around schools certainly should not be dominated by cars

It doesn't only help children

Infrastructure of the quality required truly to enable children to cycle in safety works best for everyone. That includes older people who mostly don't cycle at all in other countries and those who like to ride at speed.

Read more about what the freedom of Dutch children, the problems facing British children or my previous posts about campaigning for children. Also see how Dutch children get to school.

Whatever you might think about the merits of campaigning for children, they're the only possible source of tomorrow's adult cyclists. Infrastructure which is good enough that parents find it safe for their children is good enough for confident and fast adult cyclists as well. We all have the same need for direct, convenient routes and safety. The Netherlands has been easily the most successful nation at encouraging cycling. See examples of what works well in The Netherlands and consider taking a study tour to learn more.