Journeys in London are no longer and no different to anywhere else

Interesting figures from Transport for London about journeys by car, their lengths and purposes.

How far people are willing to travel is the same everywhere

Londoners use cars for a wide range of journey distances, but most of the journeys that London residents make, just like most journeys made in other places in the world, are short.

2/3rds of the journeys that Londoners make by car are under 5 km (3 miles) in length. Half of these car journeys are less than 3 km (2 miles) in length and a third of the total are under 2 km (1.25 miles) in length.

Clearly Londoners don't use cars just because they have long distances to travel. They use cars because they find them to be a convenient and safe way to make their journeys.

The reasons why people travel are the same everywhere
It turns out that Londoners use cars in much the same way as the Dutch people use bicycles. TfL says that "on an average day, the typical London resident aged 16+ makes 0.73 trips per day by car as a driver and 0.23 trips per day as a passenger". This is not far off the average 0.8 trips per day by bicycle by the Dutch (top cities in The Netherlands have up to 1.4 trips per day by bike).

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

A missed opportunity

Figures for the whole of The Netherlands for all journey types.
Source: Fietsberaad "Cycling in The Netherlands"

If Londoners use their cars for journeys which the Dutch would make by bike, and the distances covered by Londoners are no greater than the distances covered by the Dutch by bike, why is it that Londoners don't cycle instead of drive for those short journeys ? Why are only 2% of journeys in London by bicycle ?

I think we all know the answer by now. Cycling in heavy traffic on roads which even now continue to be designed primarily to benefit motorists over cyclists is simply not for everyone. When roads are closed for events so that people can ride without the low subjective safety which results from "sharing" with motor vehicles, tens of thousands of people turn up to ride bikes.

Most people will not take part in something that feels like an extreme sport just to pick up shopping. They just want to get to their destination and back again as easily as possible. Rather than expecting people to cycle despite conditions, a second revolution on Dutch streets in the 20th century removed motor vehicles and enabled comfortable and convenient cycling.

Continue to second post today from the same data: What happens when Londoners have children

TfL link courtesy of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain.

Average commute lengths in Toronto, Canada

Someone recently posted a comment on one of the posts on this blog in which he asserted that an average commute in Toronto was of the order of 25 km - 50 km each way.

Like any extraordinary claim, this immediately raised a flag. Average commutes in other places are much shorter than this, and it seemed so unlikely that Toronto should have commutes which were so much longer than everywhere else on earth. I looked it up and found a very interesting website about commuting statistics in Canada.

These are not cycling statistics, but
average commute lengths in Canada
for all modes of transport. Why don't
Canadians make even their short
journeys by bike? Because it's
Dangerous. In the Netherlands
journeys of the same lengths are
routinely made by bike.

It turns out that Toronto does indeed have the longest commutes in Canada, but the average length is just 9.2 km. This is much shorter than suggested in the comment. The national average is 7.2 km, which is much the same figure as you'll find anywhere in the world.

The same website also reveals that for the whole of Canada, 37.8% of commutes are over a distance of 5 km or less.

Five km is a distance very easily covered by bike, but is that how Canadians make their short journeys ? It turns out that they do not. Ottawa is the leading large city in Canada for both walking and cycling, yet walking accounts for just 7.5% of commutes and cycling for just 2%.

So if distances are not the problem, why do Canadians not use bicycles when their journey distances are short ?

The reasons are the same in Canada as in every other country where few people cycle. The conditions that (potential) cyclists face are simply not conducive to cycling. There is little specifically designed infrastructure and cycling is considered to be like an extreme sport.

Those who choose to cycle in Toronto and across Canada are "road warriors". i.e. they are members of that demographic who are most easy to convince to ride, largely young adults, predominantly male and without dependents. There is not the same wide range of demographic groups as you get with a successful and established cycling culture. As with many other cities around the world, some pockets of Toronto have a higher cycling modal share than others due to specific demographics, but the overall rate of cycling is low. Sadly, the mayor of the city has also recently been taking part in a well publicized "war on bikes" - another thing which makes the background such that cycling is unlikely to flourish.

Distance is an easy reason to give for why the cycling modal share is low, but just as in other places where this excuse is made, a little investigation shows that distances are not the problem in Toronto. In fact, none of the popular reasons given for low cycling modal shares ever really add up. Rather, for cycling to become popular, a good degree of subjective safety is needed, and cycling must be associated with a high degree of convenience and safety. That is the biggest difference between the Netherlands and other countries. We have many examples of what works.

It's the same story in other countries where claims are made that distances are "too long", including the USA. However, the reasons are the same too. Where there is inadequate subjective and social safety, few people cycle. Read previous posts about Canada for some of the reasons why.

Think your travel distances and times too great for the bike ? Dutch commutes are the longest in Europe.

People continue to claim that the Dutch cycle more frequently than people of other nations because Dutch journeys are shorter than those of whichever country the claimant happens to live in.

However, this idea that somehow the shortness of journeys in the Netherlands is the reason why the Dutch cycle more than people of other nations is simply not true.

A recent report reveals that "On average Dutch people spend one and a half hours en route each day. That is 15 minutes longer than the average time on the road for citizens of 16 EU countries, and it is also the longest." Yes, you read that right. The Dutch travel for more time every day than people of other European nations. What's more, "Holland has, at 92%, the highest percentage of the total population traveling daily and France has, at 72%, the lowest percentage."

The report also mentions that "In most East European countries, traveling by public transport takes up 20% of all travel time." This reinforces something that I blogged about a few weeks back. The choices that people make about transport are in large part determined by the wealth of the nation they live in. Local public transport (i.e. the bus) is not an option that people will easily be convinced to take if a private form of transport is available. However, that private form of transport can be a bicycle rather than a car: "Of the 91 minutes that the Dutch travel on average per day, 17 of those minutes are spent on the bicycle (19%). The neighbours i.e. the Belgians and Germans, cycle on average only 5 minutes per day, and other Europeans cycle even less. In the Netherlands, Slovenia and Italy, only 7 to 8 percent of the total travel time is spent on public transport."

Dutch people know that they travel a lot, but, as is common everywhere, they over-estimate the difference between their travel times and those of other nationalities: "Dutch people think they commute longer than residents of other countries, but in reality things are better than they suppose. Commuters in Holland spend on average 2 minutes longer per day commuting than commuters do in other countries."

Journey distances - Over what distances will people cycle ?
Having established that a lack of time spent travelling isn't what makes the Dutch cycle for such a large proportion of their journeys, let's look at something else.

In all countries there are both longer and shorter journeys. In a larger country there is a potential to make longer journeys. However, the regular journeys that people make are constrained by time and in all countries most journeys are relatively short. I pointed out that 40% of journeys in the USA are under 2 miles (3.2 km) in length. Here are some figures showing what percentage of short journeys in several different countries are made by bike:


The left cluster shows how in the Netherlands, 37% of journeys under 2.5 km are made by bike. In Denmark, 27% of them are made by bike. In Germany 14% and in both the UK and the USA, 2% of journeys up to 2.5 km are made by bike.

The second cluster shows the figures for distances of 2.5 km to 4.4 km. In this case, the numbers are 37%, 24%, 1% and 1%. The third cluster of bars is for 4.5 km to 6.4 km. At this distance, 24%, 15%, 7%, 1% and 0.4% of journeys are made by bike.

Journeys of between 4.5 and 6.4 km are cycled 60 times as frequently by the Dutch as by Americans.

The Dutch cycle considerably more than people in other countries which spend less on cycling infrastructure.

What keeps people from cycling is not distance. Rather, people won't cycle even for short journeys if the cycling experience is not pleasant. How likely the general population is to cycle correlates very well with the level of expenditure on cycling infrastructure.

The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany all spend more than average on cycling, and the result is that their populations are more likely to cycle for short journeys than people of other countries which spend less.

In The Netherlands, everyone feels comfortable to cycle, including children, older people and those with disabilities. People make a huge number of cycle journeys each day.

In the UK and USA, only a tiny proportion of the population choose the bike even for the very shortest of journeys, and by the time you get to the 4.5 km - 6.4 km journey length, the already very small participation has already shrunk to a half or a quarter of what it was for the under 2.5 km journey length.

Other excuses are summarized here.

September 2012 update
It's been pointed out to me that some people are misinterpreting the words "Of the 91 minutes that the Dutch travel on average per day, 17 of those minutes are spent on the bicycle". This does not mean that every Dutch person has a multi-modal commute. It simply tells you how much commuting is by bike vs. other modes. In the Netherlands, just like most other countries, people do what is most convenient for them. For that reason, they mostly do not have multi-modal commutes. Most commuters use one mode for their commute, either walking, cycling or driving the whole way from home to work. Other commuters combine short journeys by foot, by bike or in a car with public transport, but these commutes are counted only as public transport commutes. Dutch railway stations do provide a lot of cycle parking in order to support combining bikes with trains, but the total capacity of the railway system is not particularly high in the Netherlands. If you live in a place where trains have standing room only during commuting times then you probably have about as much multi-modal commuting as is normal in the Netherlands.

2013 update. Do the Dutch make long journeys by bike ?
One of the other common myths about The Netherlands is that all Dutch bicycle journeys are short. This is far from the truth. As in most countries, people are more likely to choose a bicycle for a short journey than for a long journey. Figures show that a remarkable 34% of all journeys made in the entire country over a distance of under 7.5 km (5 miles) are made by bicycle. However, the figures also tell that 15% of journeys over a distance between 7.5 km and 15 km (9 miles) are by bicycle and that 2% of all journeys over 15 km are by bicycle. Now 2% isn't much, but even selecting just these longer journeys, cycling has a higher share than many countries do of all their journeys by bike. The Dutch cycle longer distances far more frequently than do people of other nations.


A later blog post demonstrates how Londoners use cars for journeys of the same lengths and for the same purposes as Dutch people use bikes.

The graph came from "Making Cycling Irresistible: Lessons from The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany", by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler.

Clif Bar 2 mile challenge

People often make statements which suggest that the Dutch cycle because their journeys are short. However, it's not actually true that Dutch journeys are significantly different in length from those in other countries, and even in those countries with the longest average journey length, there are plenty of short journeys made which could be by bike. Read on...

Yes, 40% of US urban travel distances are < 2 miles. Just like elsewhere, most trips are short.

I first heard of the Clif Bar 2 mile challenge some time ago. My first reaction was that it was quite ludicrous. 2 miles (3.2 km) is such a very short distance to travel on a bike, yet here's a website showing you how to do it, what equipment to buy (there seems to be an awful lot of it) etc. Surely no encouragement should be needed to get people to make such short journeys by bike ? And why the involvement of an energy bar manufacturer ? Surely no extra energy is needed after that short distance.

However, let's look at it in its context. They claim that 40% of all urban journeys made in the US are 2 miles and under, and that 90% of those trips are by car. I dare say that these figures are correct.

Average journey distances are much the same in any country, the US and the UK having similar figures to the Netherlands. However, choices of travel mode in the Netherlands are a bit different. In this country, 35% of journeys up to five miles (7.5 km) are by bike, 26% by foot and 23% as a car driver. That's for the entire country including rural areas. You get more cycle usage (and walking) in urban areas and over shorter distances. The Dutch also make 15% of their 7.5 km - 15 km journeys by bike and 3% of their over 15 km journeys. i.e. The Dutch make at least three times as many over 15 km journeys by bike as Americans manage over any distance including the shortest. Clif Bar are right to think there is some room for improvement in the USA and it would be a good thing if they could manage to get people to change their habits, even just once a week.

A year or so ago, Kelloggs set a similar challenge in the UK. In their case it is a ten mile challenge (16 kilometres). That's the distance that your family is challenged to jointly ride their bikes in a week. Families which manage this awesome feat can win a new bike (though dare I say it's unlikely they've worn out their old ones...).

Again, it seems absurd when viewed from a country where every man, woman and child cycles an average of 2.5 km per day every day of their lives. Kelloggs had an offer with the same cycle computers in the Netherlands, but they wisely didn't bother with asking people to cycle 16 kilometres.

It would be easy to be cynical about the reasons why both these companies are involved, but I believe both are genuine attempts to raise awareness.

These two challenges are far from alone. There have been many such initiatives in the US and UK, but none of them achieve anything much by way of changing the appallingly low rate of cycle use in those countries. Perhaps this is because none of them actually address the issues which stop people cycling in the first place. A "challenge" is not what's required. What is required is conditions for cyclists which make cycling an attractive thing to do.

If cycling was less pleasant in the Netherlands, then fewer people would cycle here too. However, cycling is both safe and convenient here and the public has responded by cycling more than in any other country. With good enough conditions, cycling largely promotes itself. The same thing could be achieved anywhere, but it takes a similar dedication to building a truly excellent environment for cycling that the Dutch have demonstrated for the last few decades.

If you want to see what it's like over here yourself, we can show you.