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.

TfL's terrible "two stage right turn" - which is actually approved of by LCC

This blog post is primarily about a particularly poor suggested design for London. Click here for a particularly good design for turning across traffic, here for an example of a dangerous design,  here for a selection of good junction designs.

Yesterday evening, this week's Study Tour group, a mix of campaigners and planners from Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA, ate their evening meal with us at a nice restaurant in Groningen which happens to overlook the most dangerous junction in the whole of The Netherlands.

Why the shocked expression ? Read on

The food was great, the company was excellent, and while we watched how the traffic, especially bikes, crossed the most dangerous junction in the whole of The Netherlands, we saw several almost incidents which were enough to demonstrate why this junction is a problem. That's why we take people there. However, the shocked expression which Charlie Holland photographed on my face wasn't the result of what was going on in Groningen yesterday evening, it was the result of watching the latest video from Transport For London showing their plans for Stratford High Street, part of the extension of "Cycling Superhighway 2":

Is this the world's first cycle junction design to accommodate the needs of those people who are not "ambiturners" ? This junction design not only includes the appalling right turn design but also on-road cycle-lanes and advanced stop lines. These are also examples of old-fashioned and dangerous provision. Astonishingly, people actually get paid for this standard of work. If you're a Londoner it comes out of your taxes.

I've criticized two stage turns before because even if done well, they're hardly optimal to encourage cycling. Not only do they keep cyclists on the road, but they extend the amount of time that a cyclist spends in the junction area. Quite apart from any physical danger, this is certainly not good for subjective safety. A two stage turn is an admission of not knowing how to deal with cyclists. It results in delays, it's difficult with a cargo bike, when carrying children or towing a trailer to spin on the spot and enter the correct position to make the turn. If you're an older person or have a disability then the problems will be even greater. This design is particularly illogical, quite the reverse of the self-explaining streets which the Dutch strive for. It will not be easy for people, especially children, to understand so it will be used in ways the designer did not intend.

Some ASLs still exist in NL, but they're
amongst the things you should not copy
despite being "Dutch"

I've also criticized Advanced Stop Lines (bike boxes) before because these also cause conflict. A cyclist trying to position themselves correctly to make a right turn in such a box is required to ride across other lanes of traffic. The TfL designer actually expects this to happen as they've planned in an ASL which is in the middle of the road for right turns. This would not be required if they had designed the junction properly in the first place so that there was no advantage to cyclists from riding in front of buses.

"Being aware of each other" is not infrastructure, it's an accident waiting to happen. Crashes occur when people are not paying attention and it is the function of correctly designed infrastructure to be forgiving of mistakes, not to rely on people behaving perfectly in order to be safe.

Questions
Questions for the designer: Who is the target audience for this ? Who is it that requested their journeys be made longer and less convenient and who wanted to spend more of their time when cycling around junctions with motor vehicles ?

It won't necessarily be safe, but I expect
anyone running late for an appointment
will be tempted by the convenience of
the red line over the longer orange line

Do you really expect that someone will ride that extra distance to position themselves in your secondary waiting area if they're running late ? No-one should have to choose between "safe" and "convenient". This design forces people to have to make a "devil's bargain" when good infrastructure doesn't force that choice to be made.

Would you let a five year old ride across this junction ? Would you even let a teenager ride unaccompanied here ? If not, why not ? Is it not easy enough to understand ? Can errors easily be made ? These are admissions that the junction is not sustainably safe. Accidents will happen and injuries and deaths are likely to result from the building of infrastructure like this.

It's not just a sketch
According to the description on TfL's youtube channel, this is going to be reality in London as of October 2013. It is to be part of London's "superhighway" network.

Frankly, it's amazing that someone can do work of this quality, that they can pass it to their boss, it gets approval to be built, people can make promotional videos of it and the promotion department can let people know about it, and all of the people involved should have been paid for their efforts without anyone noticing how dreadful it is.

Transport For London, is this really the best you can do ? Do you honestly imagine that this will enable you to catch up with The Netherlands ?

What should they have done ?
The most advanced treatment of a traffic light junction in the Netherlands now is the Simultaneous Green junction. These junctions remove all conflict in both space and time. No-one has to find their way to the front of a queue of motor vehicles. No-one has to wait twice to make one turn. Everyone gets to take the most direct route across the junction, no matter what their skill level and without any risk of being run over. Children can ride safely across because it is obvious how to ride safely across such a junction. It's even possible to incorporate right turn on red for cyclists only and to make the phases of the lights such that cyclists' average delays are half that of motorists. There is a lot of inbuilt flexibility in Simultaneous Green junctions.

Yesterday, hours before dinner and hours before I'd seen TfL's video, our Study Tour group rode over this simultaneous green junction in Groningen. It's somewhat larger than the junction that TfL are planning for but extremely convenient and easy to use. Because no-one from TfL was in the Study Tour group, no-one from TfL saw this far superior and proven design of junction for themselves.

What's more, this design already exists and is proven at many different sizes of junction, from joining tiny roads (in Assen there's an example which has just one lane of motor traffic and a contra-flow cycle-lane) right up to junctions larger than that which TfL are dealing with, several lanes in each direction.

Simultaneous Green works for large
and small junctions. This road has
nothing but a short on-road cycle-lane
feeding into the junction and has on-
road car parking. It still works well.

In all cases, Simultaneous Green junctions are both convenient and safe for everyone to use. No-one is encouraged to choose a less safe route across the junction if they're in a hurry.

Before wasting money on doing the wrong thing, why didn't TfL send people over here to find out what real cycling infrastructure was, so that they were equipped to do a better job than they have ?

Not just London.
Southampton is also getting in on the act. More bad infrastructure design for a "superhighway", again making the mistake of separating "less confident" cyclists and giving them an inferior solution and again in a location which could very easily accommodate a Simultaneous Green junction which gave all cyclists both safety and convenience:

Complete with the three dangerous features of a bad bus stop design, on-road cycle-lanes and advanced stop-lines as well as supporting "less confident" cyclists in a different and less convenient way than those who are "more confident", this junction design which Southampton claims is "Dutch" is actually absolutely nothing like real Dutch infrastructure. Why do British councils take tax-payers' money and use it to pay people who do such shoddy work as this ? Again, this would be far superior, far safer and more convenient for cyclists and also far more representative of real Dutch infrastructure if it had been designed as a simultaneous green junction.

Southampton, the design which you are considering is not "Dutch". You are being sold a copy of a type of junction which kills cyclists in Denmark. Please consider sending your planners on a Study Tour to find out about better solutions than this. Send them to find out what really is built in The Netherlands, how and why it works, so that you can apply the same principles in your city.

Click here to book a study tour

We demonstrate real Dutch cycling infrastructure over three days, showing some of the very best examples as well as demonstrating why the less good infrastructure should not be emulated.

Let us help you to avoid the costly mistake of building infrastructure which causes the conflict, danger and inconvenience which you have designed into the Itchen Bridge junction.

Saturday 31st August update
I've just found out that London Cycling Campaign actually approve of the ridiculous design shown at the top of this page for Stratford High Road. In fact, they're taking credit for it.  This is one of two things they describe as "solutions proposed by our Love London, Go Dutch campaign" (note that in response to this criticism they changed their web page at this link to say that it's a "poor implementation", but the headline remains as positive as before and comments under the blog post still refer to their enthusiasm).

Londoners, you've got to seriously think about this. You are represented by a campaigning organisation which sees "Love London, Go Dutch" as merely a slogan and nothing to do with actual Dutch infrastructure. Sadly, this has been obvious from the very start of their "campaign" when they admitted that one of their "Dutch" ideas was not Dutch at all and that they'd actually made up something they thought of as a "hybrid" of ideas from several countries but which actually doesn't appear in any other country.

I covered this a couple of weeks ago.
This one metre wide bus-stop bypass
with a post in it which is being praised
by LCC is not remotely the same as
"thousands in the Netherlands"

Another piece of infrastructure design which LCC are taking credit for is the inadequately designed bus stop bypass further along the same route (CS2). While LCC claim that there are "literally thousands of these in the Netherlands", that's simply not true. There are indeed thousands of bus stop bypasses over here, but they don't look like the one on CS2 - they're engineered to a far higher standard.

So long as the LCC continues to have such low aspirations for London, they will continue to be a part of the problem regarding cycling in the UK rather than being part of the solution.

I have invited people from London Cycling Campaign to join us on one of our Study Tours so that they can see and use real Dutch cycling infrastructure and have it explained to them. Thus far, they have declined the offer.

3rd October update
It's disappointing to see that instead of admitting that they've made an error, the LCC continue to try to spin this issue.

An LCC representative writes in a response to this blog post that "Well-designed two-stage right turns are approved of by both Dutch and Danish authorities and are common in Denmark". In fact, nothing remotely like the video from TfL above, which LCC says "could make cycling safer and more convenient" exists in The Netherlands. Remember that the campaigning position that LCC was forced by their membership to adopt was called "Love London, Go Dutch", not "Go Danish". This is not the first time that LCC has tried to confuse Dutch and Danish practice and their repetition of assertions like this one doesn't make them into facts.

It's not good enough for LCC to appropriate the language of change (as has happened with subjective safety and Go Dutch) but to carry on as usual, continuing to promote second-best solutions in London. While this continues, LCC remains part of the problem rather than part of the solution. These things need to turn into real policy and real change not just slogans.

I also note a comment made in the LCC response about not having been on our tours but going to "experts" instead. What LCC have actually turned down is the opportunity to take part in the only cycling study tours in this country run by people who speak English as a native language, who have lived and cycled in both the UK and the Netherlands and understand both countries and who are completely independent. We do not use the tours to sell the services of Dutch companies (note that employing a Dutch company is no guarantee that you'll get a Dutch quality of infrastructure). We demonstrate what does not work and why it does not work as well as showing those things which work very well. We don't give a false impression by visiting highlights but we aim to give an honest appraisal. We point out that not everything "Dutch" is worth copying, we don't rubber stamp anything and we won't be polite about bad ideas.

Frankly, I find the attitude of the LCC quite puzzling. If they were genuinely interested in furthering cycling, they would have investigated all possible sources of information, and that includes us. But they did not. Some people in LCC value our work enough to have asked us to do unpaid work for the organisation. They've also been happy to use our photographs and videos for free. But their interest extends only so far as what they can take. Apart from that, LCC has not made any contact at all.

We run our tours in order to try to educate people in organisations like LCC so that they can make better use of their funds and be more effective. Yes we do charge for the tours but this does not make us wealthy. In fact, we've barely done better than break even over the six years that we have operated study tours. That is as planned. This is not a self-serving exercise. Thankless as it often feels, this is something we invested a great deal of time and money into in order to try to make the world into a better place. When we've been able to afford to do so, we've even often offered free tours (i.e. at our cost) to people who thought would especially benefit.

If LCC staff are going to try to slight us, then it's only fair to point out that an independent source pointed out a couple of years ago that "70% of its budget goes on staff salaries and that the search for more funding is seen as an important LCC goal".

If anyone has their snout in the trough, I can assure readers that it's not us. We receive 0% of LCC's budget.

November 2013 update
In November, LCC returned to praising the CS2 extension of which this junction is a part, claiming it to be "a major success for LCC" before turning around and criticizing it a couple of days later after there had been fatalities on CS2. This is not good enough.

In case you're wondering, the most dangerous junction in the whole of the Netherlands is much less dangerous than several junctions in London. Nevertheless, this junction is an example of bad design and our study tours visit it because it is one of several places where we can demonstrate how conflicts are generated by bad design. TfL really would have benefited from this.

Exaggeration considered harmful. Hiding the real story about cycling.

Click for the original copy

I just received a rather triumphant press release from Cambridge Cycling Campaign. It's a "good news story" about "5000 more bicycles" which I expect will be reported verbatim elsewhere. However as an ex resident of the city it instantly rang bells for me and I think it deserves a little analysis before blindly reproducing the claims.

The central claim is that there has been an increase of 37% of "employed people cycling to work everyday by residents of the City of Cambridge" between 2001 and 2011. There is also a claim that there are "now more people walking and cycling to work than people using buses, cars, taxis, or motorbikes combined", that the worst performing ward of Cambridge is Cherry Hinton with a "Percentage of residents cycling to work" of  23.3% while the best performing is Newnham with 40.6%. They also pointed out that "the rates of bicycle use may be under-representative of the actual bicycle use", suggesting that both the high rate of student cycling and multi-modal commutes both meant that these figures were underestimates. The reader is to assume that the actual cycling rate in the city is somewhat higher than these already high figures, based on nothing but a suggestion.

Cambridge and surroundings by bicycle. Darkest blue are
areas with between 20 and 30% of commutes by bike. Light
green in 5% - 10 %. The light brown colour found beyond the
boundary of the city indicates that just 0% - 5% of commutes
in those places are by bicycle. Cambridge is very obviously
an island in this view.

It all sounds amazing. But can be we believe these figures ? I think not. Cambridge certainly has the highest cycling modal share in the UK. That is supported by many published figures and Cambridge stands out as an island on the Guardian's visualisation of the census data. Cambridge almost certainly also has the highest cycling modal share of any city across the English speaking world (I've discussed some of the reasons why). I like the city a lot. We lived there for nearly 20 years in large part because of the cycling, which is somewhat ahead of the rest of the UK. However, this exaggeration is painting a false picture of how much cycling there actually is in the city.

I believe the figures are based on British Government 2011 census stats published a few days ago. These were summarised quite nice with an interactive map overlay on the Guardian website. Cambridge achieved the highest figure for cycling with 18.1% of people saying that cycling is the main way that they commute to work.

It is important to note the source of these figures. They come not from traffic counts or observations of actual behaviour of commuters but from a survey question which asked about "the main way people commute to work". Any such survey is open to Response Bias - a tendency for people to give the answer that they think the questioner wants to hear. Such surveys are also quite open to people's own interpretations of how they think they travel. i.e. "Cyclists" are likely to say that they cycle even if they do so only two days a week on average. There are many causes of error in survey results, and while with care we can compare one survey with another taken at the same place on the same date of a different year, any comparison with different dates, different places or with the result of an analysis of behaviour measured in a different manner is at the very least to make some dangerous assumptions.

The press release combined "walking and cycling" as that made the figures sound more exciting than they actually were by adding the 9.6% of people who self-reported as walking to work to the 18.1% who said that they cycle. Note also that the 3% of people who said they used the train to get to work, 0.2% who said they used a coach and 0.1% who say they use light rail have been excluded from the comparison group of "buses, cars, taxis and motorbikes". That's how it was made possible to claim that cycling and walking combined were "more popular in Cambridge than the internal combustion engine."

Cambridge and surroundings by car. Darkest blue are areas
of between 60 and 75% of commutes by car. The lightest
green indicates 15% - 30% by car. A different scale had to be
be used compared with that for bikes because there is far more
driving than cycling in this area. Cambridge is an almost
invisible island in this view.

However, we must note that when we look at the raw stats on the Guardian site show that many places all the way across the UK, including just on the edge of Cambridge achieve a figure of between 45% and 60% of commutes by car without excluding anyone. The most extreme have between 60% and 75% by car, with one of these appearing just a few miles from Cambridge, and that's without anyone having to cook the books to make the numbers appear higher. Cycling remains a minority pursuit across the UK.


This press release was not the first example of exaggeration that I'd seen based on the same survey results. In fact, it took only a couple of days after their publication for the cycle of exaggeration to begin. A Cambridge politician excluded some of the groups used in the original report in order to report that "nearly 32% of those who travel to work in Cambridge get there by bicycle". This is presumably the reason for the peculiarly precise language used in the press release ("the number of employed people cycling to work everyday by residents of the City of Cambridge"). The more people we remove from the comparison, the more meaningless it becomes because each time we remove people we remove information. If we were to continue the process of removing groups of people who do not cycle, then we would end up reporting merely that 100% of cyclists ride bikes, which of course is a meaningless statement.

Now I have to note that it's rather self-serving for a politician to say this. Politicians have a long history of claiming to be working for cycling while in reality they spend far too little on cycling infrastructure. This is certainly true within Cambridge.

The press release goes on to say that "Much of this increase can be attributed to the hard work of councillors and officers at Cambridgeshire County Council and Cambridge City Council, for which we thank them." and that  "Cambridge has grown with virtually no additional motorcar traffic because of the money spent on cycling." when in fact, the investment in Cycling within Cambridge has for a very long time been a tiny fraction of that spent to benefit motorists. Indeed, it's not many years ago that the Cambridge Cycling Campaign itself pointed out that the expenditure on "cycleways, footpaths and safe routes to school combined" was just 0.6% of the local transport budget. When I wrote an introduction to an article printed in their newsletter I pointed out that local expenditure amounted to just "£1.45 per person per year".

The long running saga of, and
inadequate solution in Gilbert Road
is another example of Cambridge
Cycling Campaign acquiescence.

Unfortunately, Cambridge Cycling Campaign now seems to have joined with the council in their attempts to exaggerate the achievements of the city. It is a mystery to me why a campaign group which has watched remarkably little progress occur for nearly two decades should have decided to help the very politicians who have done so little for cyclists. To do this provides no basis for future campaigning. If everything's fine already, why even bother with campaigning ?

This is not the first time that false statements have been made about Cambridge. In the 1990s, one of the councils in Cambridge published a leaflet which described Cambridge as "the second best city in the world in which to cycle after Amsterdam" (or words along those lines). That wasn't true then, and this isn't true now.

Why exaggerate ?
Of course, Cambridge is far from the only place to exaggerate its achievements. Many other places do the same. I've pointed out some of Copenhagen's repeated exaggerations but also found Amsterdam exaggerating the truth. Portland made a similar claim to 1990s Cambridge when they said they were "only second to Amsterdam". Popular lists of "top cycling cities" regularly present figures which have no basis in fact, which are collected by sufficiently different means that they cannot be compared with one another, or the simply miss out many Dutch cities and this is often done in order to hype one place over another.

Of course it takes some effort to find good figures. I've found it difficult to get to the bottom even of many figures published here in the Netherlands. Emails which I've sent asking for the source of figures which apparently contradict each other have gone unanswered.

Is anyone actually interested in facts any more ? Is this exaggeration simply a reflection of people liking to be told that where-ever it is that they happen to live is good ? Does anyone want to actually learn from what works elsewhere, or are we all too busy claiming to be number one ?

Exaggeration considered harmful

A 20 km radius around Assen - the distance within which
it is normal for secondary school age students to cycle into
the city to school. Green spots show where school friends
of our children lived and from where they cycled to get to
school. The red line shows the route of a school triathlon
ridden by unaccompanied 12 year olds who had come to
school by bike and who afterwards rode back home.
Nothing out the ordinary in this country, but in the UK ?

The problem is that this exaggeration is harmful. It is harmful because it prevents progress from being made.

If all sets of figures have been "cooked" to some degree then we have absolutely no basis for comparison at all. If figures which are accurate from one place can only be compared with "cooked" figures from another then it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to work out what works.

When figures are exaggerated, no new information is being created. All that happens is that the truth is swamped beneath piles of meaningless press releases. Hiding the facts does not help cyclists, and cycling campaigners do not help their own constituency by boosting their own cities purely for the sake of an impressive press release.

For cycling to grow we need to look at the best practice from all around the world, not encourage people to accept the low standards of what they already have. For progress, we have to continue to be critical. Even in the world's genuine top cycling city, campaigners are rightly not satisfied with what they are given if it doesn't result in an ever improving standard.

Far too much emphasis on "cycling cities"

The same 20 km radius around Cambridge showing how
even adult commuter cycling drops rapidly to below 5%.
 The red line shows the route that a 14 year old boy in a village
could not take to get to school. Seemingly no-one thought it
reasonable to suggest that he cycled. I've cycled there myself
in the past and I wouldn't have suggested it either. Whatever
the quoted statistics say, there is an enormous difference in the
ease of cycling between Cambridge and Assen.

What the data from the Guardian website shows most vividly is just how much of an island Cambridge is. There is an amazingly sharp drop off in cycling as you reach the edge of the city. In most of the surrounding countryside the patterns of transport are the same as the rest of the country. i.e. Very low cycle usage, very high car usage.

The idea of "cycling cities" is itself harmful. There is no reason why we should only consider cities, nor why we should expect that people will only cycle in cities, nor why we should be so interested in counting only how much cycling there is in cities, nor how high the figures can be made to look for a subset of cyclists in a small area.

That is not how it works in the Netherlands. We don't have cycling cities, but cities, towns and villages in a cycling country. Cycling doesn't drop off at the boundaries of cities but is normal all the way out into the countryside and through all the villages until you reach the next city, where it's also normal. It's normal for secondary school children to commute relatively long distances through the countryside to reach the nearest city where their school is. It's normal for elderly people to go on rides together just because it's a pleasant thing to do. To make these things possible requires a lot more than boastful exaggeration. It requires reliably consistent quality of cycling infrastructure and investment of enough money to do a decent job of a comprehensive cycling network which goes everywhere - this ensuring a sufficient degree of subjective safety that cycling is accessible to everyone.

Now I could finish by quoting some spectacularly high figures for cycling in this area, but I won't. If I did, would you believe them ? I hope you would not without taking a close look first. Suffice to say that there is considerably more cycling here by a far wider demographic than exists anywhere in the UK, including in Cambridge. That's covered by the usual unspectacular figure quoted for the whole of the Netherlands: 27% of journeys in the whole country are made by bike, that's for all the people and all their journeys for all reasons.

Update: Two years later, more exaggeration
In November 2015, the Cambridge Evening News reported that "there has been a massive 88 per cent increase in cyclists" in an article which was picked up by other sources which point out that "Cambridge already has record cycling participation levels with 20% of trips made by bike". i.e. after the supposed near doubling of cycling in Cambridge, the actual modal share remains at the same figure as I've been quoting for many years.

Exaggeration doesn't help now, it didn't help four years ago and it didn't help twenty years ago. What is required in Cambridge is a go everywhere grid of genuinely improved infrastructure, not piecemeal developments combined with many words.

Notes:

The picture above of Cambridge as an island may seem to fly in the face of frequently made claims that Cambridgeshire as a whole has a higher percentage of trips by bike than other counties. However, note that a quarter of the population of Cambridgeshire lives in Cambridge. The bubble in the city therefore makes the whole county appear to have a higher modal share for cycling than is actually the case outside the city of Cambridge itself.

It should also be pointed out that the claim made in the press release that cycling has risen by 37% between 2001 and 2011 is itself dubious and difficult to support based on previous claims from the Cambridge Cycling Campaign. The current figure from the census is 18.1%. However, Cambridge Cycling Campaign has claimed higher rates many times in the past. For example in an article on the 2001 census published in 2003, "In Cambridge in 2001, 25.91% of workers between the ages of 16 and 74 travelled to work by bicycle" (a remarkably "precise" figure !). Another page says that "According to the 2001 census 28% of all commuting trips within Cambridge are by bike". The 28% figure was also attributed to the RAC in 2005, while a 2007 article claimed just 25% "according to 2001 census data". None of these previously claimed figures for the rate of cycling to work in Cambridge is low enough to support the claim that there has been a 37% increase. Cycling campaign groups have often made attempts to show to cycling is "booming" in the UK, but the consistently fly in the face of the evidence, 

Do British people get the politicians that
they deserve ? Excerpt from "Watching
the English" by Kate Fox.

I don't want to single out the un-named Cambridge politician involved in cooking the figures above as he's no better or worse than the rest of them and I found him quite agreeable in person. However, I will point out that for several years I made a point of inviting all of them, including him, to accompany me on Study Tours in the Netherlands so that they could see for themselves how it is that Cambridge falls short of the standards of the Netherlands. Unfortunately, while many of them replied to let me know that they were "interested", every one of them sadly turned out not to have a gap in their busy agendas on any of the dates that I'd planned. Unfortunately, it also turned out that not one of them could make it on a date of their own choosing or even at my expense. Politicial commitment to cycling clearly only goes so far.

I direct much the same sentiment towards the Cambridge Cycling Campaign. They're a good bunch of people who I again largely know personally. However their aspirations remain far too low for what is possible in their city and they are too easily led by the local politicians. The Campaign has now been in existence for seventeen years. That's the same period of time as it took for the whole of the Netherlands to get from Stop de Kindermoord to a very good standard of infrastructure. Cambridge has not made the same transformation over the same period of time.

"Second to Amsterdam" is a remarkably lazy claim which demonstrates the lack of knowledge of those who would claim it. Amsterdam may be ahead of places outside of this country but it's certainly not "the best" place in the Netherlands. For a start, rates of school cycling are lower in Amsterdam than in other Dutch cities.

There's a Dutch saying "Meten is weten". Translated into English this means "Measuring is knowing". The principle is sound: unless you have reliable measurements, you don't really know anything.

Read more blog posts about Cambridge.

Keeping child cyclists safe

Two stories from our local TV:

As is usual for Dutch villages, De Groeve is connected by cycle-paths to the nearest town. The existing cycle-path was quite good. I was very impressed when I first rode along it in 2008.

There was really just one problem with this cycle-path. At night it was not well enough lit for parents to feel that their children were safe riding to and from school.

Press the button to make the lights
brighter. There's also a counter

A few months ago something new was installed. The new lights will operate at night time at half power, but passing cyclists can press a button at either end of the route to switch the lights onto full power for enough time to ride the 3 km distance. This measure reduces both energy consumption and disturbance of night-time wildlife due to the lights. If it's successful, the same system will be installed at other locations in Drenthe.

Grotere kaart weergeven

Grotere kaart weergeven

We already have other wildlife friendly lighting, such as green tinted LED cycle-path lighting at several locations in Assen.

However, all is not completely rosy for child cyclists in the Netherlands. These days they're involved in an increasing number of crashes, mostly single rider crashes, or cyclists colliding with one another. The reason why ? Perhaps it's due to mobile phones:



Meanwhile, According to a press-release from the Stichting Consument en Veiligheid, more Dutch children are having accidents with their bikes due to more of them having mobile phones and more of them using those phones while cycling (please note that as pointed out in the comments, not everyone agrees there has been a rise in danger and the Stichting has itself been criticised for being alarmist. I have learnt not to read much that I read in press releases about cycling).

Of course, every one of the children who is interviewed says that they behave perfectly and it's everyone else and not them. All the children being interviewed claim to be extremely careful and don't use their phones while cycling, though one admits to listening to music.

No-one wants children to be in danger, so extra safety lessons are being given in order to try to convince children not to use mobile phones while cycling to school. This is perhaps not entirely a bad thing.

Both of these videos demonstrate one thing quite clearly, though. It's normal in the Netherlands for small children to cycle to school, in daylight, at night time, in the summer, in the winter. Mostly they do this unaccompanied by adults (on average this is by the age of 8 and a half). In order for this to happen it must be safe enough for children to cycle without parents becoming overly worried about their childrens' safety. The literature that children are given does not emphasize helmets and reflectives as these are remarkably ineffective in increasing all three types of safety in comparison with working on sustainable safety measures.

Not only do childrens' bikes have
dynamos, so do their textbooks. A
day after writing this post, I
spotted my daughter studying this.

Almost all the bikes in the videos are fitted with dynamo lighting systems so that the lights are always present, reliable, and never have a flat battery. I recently wrote a comprehensive guide to selecting, installing and trouble-shooting dynamo lighting.

Just in case you think you're safe in Scotland...

Spokes, the Lothian Cycle Campaign, has produced a handout about the upcoming transport budget cuts in Scotland.

Oh, hang on. Did I say cuts ? It's only a cut for walking and cycling. The total budget for transport is being increased from £1804m to £1884m, while the part of that budget which is for walking and cycling combined is being reduced from £20m to £15m.

There are 5.2 million people in Scotland, so the budget for cycling and walking combined is being reduced from £3.84 per person per year to £2.88.

In other words, the budget is being reduced from 1% of the transport budget to 0.7% of the transport budget. That's not investing in cycling, it's fobbing off cyclists.

Scottish politicians who promised to "increase the proportion of transport spending on ... active and sustainable travel" would seem to have gone back on their word. Another broken promise.

You can read more on the handout itself (click and it gets bigger) or on the Spokes website.

It's a long way from the level of expenditure which is required for growth to a significant rate of cycling. The Dutch spend about €30 per person per year on cycling.

However, some local authorities in Scotland remain bullish: In Dumfries and Galloway, where the cycling modal share is approximately 3%, the new local transport strategy says "Overall, cycling and walking infrastructure is considered to be of a good standard and the council consequently considers that only incremental improvements to existing networks will be required in the short term".

Clearly they're not aiming very high. If the infrastructure was truly good, the modal share would be higher. There is pent up demand in Scotland just as anywhere else, but people don't cycle as much as they'd like to due to a lack of subjective safety.

The Cycling Action Plan for Scotland says that 2% of children in Scotland currently cycle to school. Cycling Scotland say it's 1% of primary school children and 2% of secondary school children. Like many organisations which despite lots of hard work still don't manage to increase the school cycling rate significantly, they are both placing more emphasis on training than on infrastructure improvements. That's why you don't see scenes like this every single day around every Scottish school.

£2.88 per person per year isn't enough to change the infrastructure so that cycling becomes something that people want to do. It can't be achieved on a shoe-string, and it certainly can't be achieved when budgets shrink rather than grow. When the transport budget in Scotland is growing, what can possibly be the excuse for shrinking the budget for cycling and walking ?

July 2013 update. D & G council talks to the press
In Dumfries, the BBC reports that "Plans to extend a sustainable travel project have been put on hold until firm evidence is produced to prove its effectiveness".

Less than two years ago, as you can read above, I pointed out that their boasting of already having "a good standard" of cycling infrastructure was premature. Considerably more investment is required to produce conditions in which people feel safe to cycle. Building just a few scattered and half-hearted pieces of infrastructure has never worked. A comprehensive network with very high quality is required.

Dumfries and Galloway could have sent representatives on one of our Study Tours two years ago in order to find out what was required, but they didn't. We would still like to welcome people from Dumfries and Galloway in the future. There is much to learn. Assen is town not much larger than Dumfries and we experience far harsher winters winters than does Dumfries but people cycle here in numbers which are unknown anywhere in the British isles. Come and see how this was achieved.