How much time do you have ? Who are we doing this for ?

Our car has a faded sticker in the back
window left over from a previous
attempt to call for "space for cycling"
in Britain. It makes no sense to repeat
the same tried and failed campaigns..
Update: scrapped five years later

News from Britain
After much campaigning effort on behalf of cyclists in the UK, there was a debate on Monday about cycling. This has been much reported, and of course it is good news in itself that the debate happened. However, nothing has been promised as a result. All that has happened is that a motion was carried by those MPs who attended this meeting and this motion suggests setting a target of 10% of journeys by bike by 2025 and 20% by 2050. This has not been adopted by government, it is only to be the subject of more discussion.

Things like this have happened before. In 1996 the British government went further than it has yet this time around. Then, the National Cycling Strategy was adopted, an organisation was set up to oversee it which had some funds allocated and promises were made including "to double the number of cycle trips in Britain by 2002, and to double them again by 2012." i.e. by last year, 8% of journeys in the UK should have been by bike. This didn't happen. What happened in reality was that the strategy was dropped quietly a few years later and the modal share for cycling in the UK stayed more or less the same. Several other initiatives have come and gone between 1996 and now, none of them leaving a significant impact.

How much time do you have ?
The long time-scales involved with the new motion are a concern. By 2050, many of the people who debated that motion will either be retired or have deceased. That at least lets them off the hook should the policy fail as they won't be able to be held accountable for failure. Many of the people who turned up for the mass protest ride which also took place on Monday will also be retired or deceased by 2050. Even the children of the people who went on the demo won't benefit much from a policy the result of which will only be known 37 years in the future as even they are likely to be be middle aged by the time 2050 rolls along.

Timescales are important. Rapid progress is important. The UK is already forty and a half years behind, how much longer do people have to wait for decent conditions on the streets ? How much longer do campaigners who have already lived through the last forty years of indecisiveness have to wait until things start to move forwards in the UK ? Do we really have to wait another 37 years for significant progress ? Add those 37 years to the 40 years which the UK is already behind and you get a total of 77 years. i.e. very nearly the average life-expectancy for a British male.

If the motion is adopted, will the UK even then be on path to "catch up" with The Netherlands ? Unfortunately, not. If the UK was to match Dutch expenditure starting now then we could perhaps expect the quality of cycling infrastructure to approach Dutch standards asymptotically, so that it might be quite close after a decade, closer again after two decades. For more rapid progress than this considerably greater expenditure than Dutch levels would be required. Unfortunately, the most prominent campaigns in the UK set their sights at a much lower level. They have worked towards a target of just £10 per person per year, or little more than a third of the Dutch level of expenditure on cycling, or even lower figure of £100M per year, which works out at less than a tenth of the Dutch level of expenditure. A lower level of expenditure can never result in "catching up". It can only result in falling behind at a lower rate than at present, but calling for a lower level of expenditure costs just as much campaigning effort as calling for enough.

How efficiently is the money spent ?
What's more, we must also consider the relative efficiency of how the money is spent. In Cambridge this week we learnt that what is frankly a terrible transformation of a traffic light junction cost £450K from the cycling budget. In Assen, a much higher quality traffic light junction transformed just a few years ago cost just €32K from the cycling budget. If Britain is to achieve as much as The Netherlands does then the country not only needs to provide the same level of funding, but it also needs to spend those funds just as efficiently. Spending a third of the funds at a tenth of the efficiency certainly won't cut it.

Dutch children go to and from
school like this today . How long do
British children have to wait ?

Who is it for ?
Who are we doing this for ? It can't be for today's adult cyclists because any potential result is so far off into the future that it won't help us. The children of today's generation of cycle campaigners also won't benefit much because they'll be middle aged and parents themselves by the time 2050 comes along. Perhaps the grandchildren of today's cycling campaigners might benefit while they are still children. We should be campaigning for children, but we shouldn't be doing that simply because progress is so slow that we can never expect to see results within our lifetimes.

The Dutch made rapid progress in the 1970s and 80s by focusing on what was important to them and allocating the required funds. There s no reason why the UK could not do the same thing if a real commitment is made, good plans are in place, and real funding is made available. However, all these things need to come together.

A different campaign
Our campaigning has always been a little different because of our emphasis on children. We emigrated because not only would this improve our own lives but it also seemed like the only way we could achieve a better standard of living for our own children, but of course that's not an easy thing to do and it isn't something that everyone can or should do.

UNICEF rates the well-being of
Dutch children highly and other
cycling nations also score well.

It's a great disappointment to me that campaigning for Dutch infrastructure in the UK has been derailed so thoroughly by self interested groups. Gobsmackingly terrible cycling infrastructure continues to be proposed in the UK while Cycling campaigners (2), councils (2, 3, 4) and developers alike, all keen to push their own agendas, slap the words "Dutch" and "Holland" as branding on these proposals rather than using them as an indication that they are truly working for infrastructure of the quality and with the expected result seen in The Netherlands. "Go Dutch" is now so devalued in cycle campaigning in Britain that it is virtually meaningless. Having seen equally dubious proposals in other countries also described as "Dutch", this is clearly not only a British problem

For this reason, we've started campaigning very obviously in another direction. In reality it's a return to what we were always campaigning for, but hopefully this emphasis will prevent it from being so easily derailed. Walking and cycling infrastructure is but a means to an end. That end is that people can travel freely by foot and by bicycle.

A different campaigning emphasis is needed to achieve the same standard of living for children in other countries as Dutch children already have. Hence The Campaign for Childhood Freedom.

While walking infrastructure is common in most countries and usually already exists in a network which covers at least most of the places where distances are short and walking is a viable means of transport, cycling infrastructure is far less common. Cycling is particularly sensitive to subjective safety issues because cyclists are often expected to ride on busy roads. These concerns are doubled if parents are asked to consider what they will allow their children to do.

Children won't achieve freedom due to a small number of vanity projects or by minor improvements. It requires what "Go Dutch" should have implied. i.e. a dense network of very high quality infrastructure which goes everywhere, is convenient to use and is easy to understand so that it can be used safely by a five year old walking alone or riding his/her own bike. Nothing less than this is enough.

Judy and I can't be everywhere at once and in any case we don't want to travel long distances because that also would have an effect on all our children. Each country needs to own its own campaign. We want to help as much as we can by recommending ideas and we want to foster the formation of a network of people world-wide who are willing to organise campaigns in their own country which are focused on childhood freedom. For this purpose we have started a discussion forum to enable communication about how best to free children everywhere.

It is their sensitivity to the danger that their children are exposed to and wanting to look after their children which causes parents to drive more than non-parents. Parents put themselves out in order to try to keep their children safe, however children don't really benefit at all from being put into automobiles to make their journeys. Children need freedom and they especially need to cycle. The freedom which comes from being able to cycle is a good part of what results in UNICEF rating the well-being of Dutch children so highly. If we could redirect some parents' energy towards a greater goal than merely trying to make their own child so safe as possible right now then we would have an enormous movement.

If you want today's and tomorrow's children to be able to live as Dutch children already do, please get involved. If you're not sure what it takes, find out for yourself and ask questions on the forum. There are no "experts". Everyone's opinion is valuable.

We believe that parents world wide want the best for their children and they want to see progress while their children are still young enough to benefit from it, however you do not have to be a parent yourself in order to be concerned about these issues. We respect that some people have made a very rational decision to be child-free and others cannot have children. You are welcome to take part in the discussion. All adults have a responsibility for the next generation.

Let's work out together how we can achieve the same freedom for all the world's children as Dutch children already have.

What do we want ? Gradual Change. When do we want it ? In due course

This morning I read yet another comment from a member of the British cycle campaigning establishment which said "It’s taken the Netherlands 40 years to get from where they were in the 70s to what you see there now". This excuse is used often in Britain seemingly as a reason why British campaigners should be happy with less than the Dutch have.

New Scientist magazine in 1981. Just eight years after
Stop De Kindermoord, The Dutch were already ahead and
their success was considered to be worth emulating

But how true is it that the Dutch are "Forty years ahead", and how much sense does it make for campaigners who are supposed to be calling for change to repeat this message ? Should cyclists really expect no more than some minor variation of what they already have ? This is an example of defeatism. Campaigners should surely be looking to close the claimed 40 year gap and not making excuses for the country being so far behind.

Still from a video produced in 1990 about the Dutch Bicycle
Masterplan of 1989. In several languages, it was intended to
help planners and campaigners elsewhere. There was already
an emphasis on children.

It didn't really take 40 years in the Netherlands
It is true that the Stop de Kindermoord protests (note: these protests were for the safety of children. i.e. something with wide appeal. Not for "cycling") occurred forty years ago, but it is not true that it took forty years for the Netherlands to achieve a standard of infrastructure vastly ahead of what Britain has now.

In fact, in 1981, just eight years after those protests, an article appeared in New Scientist praising what had been achieved and suggesting that the UK should copy it.

After another 9 years, just seventeen years in total after the Dutch "Stop child murder" protests, cycling infrastructure and policy in the Netherlands were of sufficient quality that it was worth making a film about it. There are several stills from the film in this post. Follow the link to view the film yourself.

A mother cycling with very young children 23 years ago.
These small children are now adult cyclists, perhaps parents.

Useful change was achieved in the Netherlands within the time it took for a toddler to grow up into a teenager. Children for whom campaigning took place in the 1970s actually got to experience the results for themselves before they were adults. These children grew up into adults with the infrastructure which was built in response to the protests of their parents. Fewer of them died than would have been the case if those protests had not been listened to and their children now benefit from the inertia gained during that period of time.

Why so little progress in the UK ?
So what has happened and continues to happen in the UK ? Has the UK really had less time in which to achieve results, or is just that no real effort has been expended in cycling ? Why has progress been so slow that it can't be measured at all ? Where were the campaigners during all this time ? Have they not had time to respond to the lack of progress ?

Dutch School Children with the freedom to cycle to school
23 years ago. They've grown up and their children now cycle
to school. British children just got training. Their children
got yet more training. It still hasn't resulted in
scenes like this, and never will.

I noted a few blog posts ago that the Cambridge Cycling Campaign was established seventeen years ago. The organisation has been in existence for the same amount of time as it took for the Netherlands to change an entire country's streets to the point where the Bicycle Masterplan video first show-cased the quality of Dutch cycling facilities to the world.

But the Cambridge Cycling Campaign is, like many smaller groups, actually a relative newcomer to campaigning. London Cycling Campaign was founded in 1978. 35 years have passed since they began their campaign for London's cyclists.

Parents of those Dutch children cycled to work. Many are
now grandparents who still cycle. Generations of Dutch
people have benefited.

Sustrans was founded a year earlier than LCC so they've had 36 years in which to foment change right across the country, like the LCC, they've existed for twice as long as it took to transform the Netherlands.

This post was prompted by the text quoted in the first paragraph, written by someone who often speaks out on behalf of CTC. It's a common claim in the UK, and I'm not rounding on this individual, but CTC itself should know better. In cycling terms, CTC is an incredibly ancient organisation. Founded in 1878, they're one of the very oldest cycling organisations on the planet and have had a whopping 135 years in which to campaign for cyclists. That's eight times as long as it took to transform the Netherlands. Unlike the newer organisations, CTC has been there fighting for cyclists, for the entire post-second-world-war period over which cycling has declined.


Time is clearly not the issue. There has been plenty of time for Britain to have achieved all that the Dutch have, and more. Many people have worked very hard for cycling, they've given much of their time over many years, yet progress has not been made. Why ?

New housing developments in the Netherlands were already
designed around the bike 23 years ago. When will Britain
make a start ?

So what went wrong ?
Campaigners in Britain seem to suffer from several problems. They have shown themselves to have low aspirations, not daring to ask for the proven success of the Netherlands to be replicated but instead trying to find some alternative route to mass cycling.

Cambridge Cycling Campaign
I've noted before that the Cambridge Cycling Campaign does not hold the council to high enough standards. This has continued since this blog post was written with the group asking members to support a substandard proposal for roads in their city. Other local groups in other areas of the country have done likewise. Local groups, of course, are run in a small budget and have relatively little influence.

LCC
LCC still asks for second rate infrastructure in London. They've moved from one campaign to another, and the over-active marketing people have produced a vast pile of press releases along the way. In the PR world of LCC there are always more successes to celebrate, but what they're calling for is lacklustre. For access to the Olympic park in London, LCC requested infrastructure which is worse than that provided for an average Dutch town's small scale sporting facility. "Going Dutch" was accompanied by calls for Advanced Stop Lines and a bizarre requirement for cyclists to turn 270 degrees to the left in order to make a 90 degree right turn was approved of and boasted of by LCC.

Sustrans
For many years, Sustrans has been happy to rubber stamp infrastructure which is of far too low a quality and I've quite a lot of experience with the results. I've pointed out ten years ago that Sustrans routes are impractical because they're often far more indirect than roads to the same locations. In 2006 I had to brake for an underpass through which it was impossible to cycle and then was forced to take to the road because one of their paths proved to be dangerous. Others have also pointed out that Sustrans puts their name on routes which are simply not of a quality that one can cycle on them.

Sustrans continue not to understand how to make cycling useful for the majority of the population.  Since writing this piece, Sustrans have blamed users of their paths for going "too fast". In fact, the conflict which was seen was a direct consequences of Sustrans' design - which mixes walking children with commuting cyclists on a narrow path. They then went on to rubber-stamp a dangerous roundabout design in Bedford which would mix cyclists with trucks on a turbo-roundabout, a junction design which is absolutely not suitable for cyclists even if they're very fast, and which would definitely not work for the independent 11 year olds that Sustrans usually claims to design for (since this blog post was written, the problems with Sustrans have continued. Sustrans have released a cycling infrastructure design standard of appalling quality and backed several other items of bad design in places including Southend).

Quote from 23 years ago: "Making cycling safer, for example
by separating bicycle traffic from car traffic". Why didn't
Britain start 23 years ago ? When will this become official
policy in the UK ?

CTC
The other fundamental problem has been the dogged adherence of "cyclists" in Britain to the ideology of riding on the road. This has led to CTC standing firmly in the way of Britain building the infrastructure which is required to grow cycling, while an increasing majority of the population see cycling as something alien to them. CTC has sadly long had difficulty with seeing the benefit of segregated cycling infrastructure. Bizarrely, they did approve of segregated motoring infrastructure in the form of motorways.

CTC's emphasis has largely been on training, though that's been proven not to increase cycling, and indeed the amount of cycling in the UK now is somewhat down from what it was when the CTC was at its greatest. CTC have also been active in approving of bad design including a roundabout in York and joining with Sustrans to approve the lethal Bedford roundabout design. They've leant their name to cheering about such things as small improvements in cycle parking. (2020 update: In April 2016 rebranded itself as Cycling UK. They still promote cycle training despite there still being no evidence of it leading to more cycling).

There remains great suppressed demand for cycling. People gather at events at which they can cycle in safety. However outside of those events the public image of cycling in Britain is largely of an extreme sport that only "cyclists" take part in. Cyclists are viewed as being militant and angry outsiders. In part this is a result of cycle campaigning which has focused only on the needs of "cyclists" and therefore excluded other people from taking part. It also doesn't help that cycle campaigners often take an anti-car stance which separates them from the majority. It's worth bearing in mind that the Netherlands has achieved more than anywhere else for cycling with remarkably few anti-car policies.

Targets for 2010 in the video from 1990
These targets were (pretty much) met

It's not good enough to say that conditions are good enough for everyone to cycle just because you, as a self-selected member of the small percentage of people who cycle find conditions to be good enough now, already cycle. Other people won't do it until it feels safe for them. An emphasis on training cyclists while still asking for infrastructure which suits only those who already cycle has helped the decline of cycling because it does nothing to address the most common reason why the majority do not cycle.

What do we want ? Gradual change. When do we want it ? In due course !
Think what the target actually is. If you want cycling to grow from 1% of journeys to 27% of journeys and for cycling to be normal for everyone then it must be inclusive of everyone.

Dutch railways stations already had enormous bicycle
parks (though they had to grow to keep up with demand)

Cycling should not be just about "cyclists". Cycling is beneficial for all of society. Children should be able to go to school unaccompanied. Parents should be freed from the school run. All adults who currently feel that they have no alternative but to drive and who find it expensive and stressful, should be able to choose to cycle.  Elderly people and those with disabilities should also be able to experience the freedom of cycling. Society suffers from all the well known adverse effects of excess driving, such as rat-running, road rage, obesity, air and noise pollution and the violent deaths of thousands of people every year.

This is why cycle campaigning needs to grow to be inclusive and not be focused on a tiny minority.

There is really only one place worth looking to in order to find the answers, and that is the one place where these things are already true: The Netherlands. Don't dilute demands by asking for what is unproven or by following examples from elsewhere which have achieved less. Ignore anything which was tried and abandoned in the Netherlands because there is no need to copy mistakes from here or elsewhere.

Does this look like the result of
successful policy in the UK ?

The future is what you make it. Demand nothing less than best practice loudly enough, repeat it often enough, and make sure that the full benefits for everyone are known and something just might happen. While a multitude of cycling organisations all of which have multiple ideas about what they want, which between them give a mixed and difficult to understand message and which will often offer government an easy and cheap way out, progress is nearly impossible.

There is nothing magical about what happened in the Netherlands forty years ago. This country simply decided on sensible policies which were good for society and it has stuck with them ever since.

The claim has not always been "40 years"
I can remember when campaigners and officials in the UK claimed that the Netherlands was 20, 25, 30 and 35 years ahead. It's the same claim, but it is periodically for the ever longer period of time while no progress is made in Britain.

What does this mean precisely ? It makes no sense whatsoever to justify a a further delay in making cycling accessible to everyone in Britain just because, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years have already been wasted. Fifty years ? Well, if we don't start to jump on people who make this statement, as well as those who use the other excuses for inaction, we're still going to be hearing the same sad refrain in another ten years time.

Update 29 June 2020: Someone from the UK today told me that "it took 50+ to get to NL standards". Slightly earlier than I expected to hear it, but the excuse has again had a few years added on, exactly as I predicted would happen seven years ago...

Andrew Gilligan, London's Cycling Commissioner
The first comment below this blog post, written just a couple of minutes after it went public, pointed out that Andrew Gilligan, London's "Cycling Czar", said two days ago that "it took 40 years to turn even Amsterdam into Amsterdam" in a post which is a teaser for their "vision" which will be launched tomorrow. This is no more true for London vs. Amsterdam than Britain vs. the Netherlands as a whole. Everything above applies. Come on London, you need to aim much higher than you have before.

This is no accident
Being "forty years behind" is no accident. This didn't suddenly sneak up on people, it took forty years to happen. No, being "forty years behind" in cycling is the result of forty years of making deliberate choices not to build the infrastructure which is required to support cycling. It was enabled by forty years of campaigners not saying enough to stop it.

If you want to see for yourself how the infrastructure and policy have combined to get everyone to ride bikes in the Netherlands, there's a study tour in May on which we demonstrate almost everything featured in the many posts on this blog in just three days.

The chant in the title is Kate Fox's idea of what "a truly English protest march" would sound like. It comes from her book "Watching the English". I find it interesting that the 38 page long "Rules of the Road" section of her book goes to much effort to explain how wonderful British drivers are but doesn't actually mention cycling at all, even though it says in the introduction on the first page of this section that it will discuss cycling. That this mode of transport is practically invisible even to an anthropologist studying the English says something about how commonly people cycle in that country.

The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain can rest easy for now. They've only been going for about two years and that's only a quarter of the time that it took for the Netherlands to get to the point that journalists from New Scientist were impressed. But has a quarter of that progress been made in Great Britain in the last two years ?

Asking for enough

In the last few months, we've seen a number of developments in cycle campaigning in the UK.

The Times newspaper achieved a huge amount of publicity for their "Cities safe for Cycling" campaign. This came about as a result of one of their reporters being seriously injured. However, while their campaign is no doubt genuine, it is unfortunately also the result of rather too little research. The result of this is that they set the bar for quality extremely low.

The London Cycling Campaign also launched a huge publicity drive with their "Go Dutch" theme. However, they did not understand what has actually been achieved in the Netherlands, and they also have set the bar too low, trying to "Go Dutch" by calling for infrastructure designs which fall well below the standards of the Netherlands.

Two high profile campaigns running simultaneously, both ignorant of what is required. They provide a considerable challenge to cycling campaigners who want to see real change occur in the UK.

However, all is not lost. Last September, was the date of the launch of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain. This is the group to join and support if you are interested in real change in the environment for cyclists in Britain, and in cycling growing to have a modal share similar to that of the Netherlands. In the CEoGB, a relatively small number of people, with a relatively small budget, are working for what really works without being dragged down by the baggage of vehicular cycling orthodoxy. Because it is important to support the CEoGB we have added a link to the right hand side of this blog which leads to their website.

How much is too little ?
When organisations ask for inadequate action, they are not really helping cyclists, no matter how much publicity results. The Times' asked for a total of £100 million to be spent on cycling each year in England. This sounds impressive but has actually set back campaigning for several years. They are asking for just £1.94 per person per year. While this is a higher rate of funding for cycling than in present day England, it's not really an advance but a return to the same level of funding that we were complaining about in 2005 !

In 2006, I wrote an introduction for an article which included my calculation that expenditure in Cambridgeshire in 2005 was at a rate of approximately £1.45 per person per year. Add 7 years of inflation at just over 4% and you get exactly the figure that The Times is asking for now as an aspiration.

Shopping centre in Assen. World
class infrastructure = world class
modal share

To create the "world class infrastructure" that many talk about is simply not possible for such a low figure. It also won't happen for the "£10-20 per person per year" as commonly called for by cycling campaigners who are unaware of the true level of Dutch cycling investment. Actually, the Netherlands spends about £25 per year per person (actually €30, roughly equivalent to $38). For the UK this would amount to a total of not £100M, but nearly £2B per year, every year, to be spent on cycling infrastructure. The USA would have to spend over $11B on cycling each year to match this.

This is not an insignificant sum and many campaigners shy away from mentioning this amount of money. However, it must be born in mind that this is not the price of gold-plating and doing more than is necessary, it's merely the price of the "world class infrastructure" needed to achieve the world class modal share and world class levels of safety which the Netherlands has now. Every country which spends less on cycling achieves less cycling (that includes the noisy self promoters North from here). What's more, it's not an upper limit. In future, to achieve a higher modal share and better safety, this figure will have to increase.

This should be kept in mind by all campaigners when negotiating. Compromises may sometimes have to be made, but don't make them before negotiation starts. You should not be asking for the least progress possible but the greatest progress possible.

Starting out by calling for a 20th of what you want is not a strategy for success. As I explained a few posts back, this is akin to Rosa Parks having asked merely for the signs on the bus to be in a fixed position.

Priorities
Of course, many people will say that you can't ask for this amount of money as the country can't afford it. However, this is not true. Britain is not really poor, it just prioritizes its expenditure a little differently from some other places.

For instance, the Royal Navy recently ordered two new aircraft carriers. These "supercarriers", ordered in a time supposedly of peace, will be by far the largest and most expensive ships that the Royal Navy has ever had at its disposal.

The reasons why the UK "needs" these carriers are quite bizarre. The First Sea Lord, Sir Alan West, said "I have talked with the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations) in America. He is very keen for us to get these because he sees us slotting in with his carrier groups. For example, in Afghanistan last year they had to call on the French to bail them out with their carrier. He really wants us to have these, but he wants us to have same sort of clout as one of their carriers, which is this figure at 36. He would find that very useful, and really we would mix and match with that." Yes, Britain is actually ordering these ships because the Americans want them to.

And what will this vanity project cost ? Originally the price was set at £3.5 billion apiece, but that increased to 6.2 billion and is now expected to reach £12 billion per ship before they are finished. What's more, because the country has completely lost control of this project and won't have any aircraft to put on the carriers when they are launched, it is now expected that the first ship will be mothballed immediately after launch in 2016.

This is just one example out of a long series of failed military projects. Another example memorable to me was of spending billions on failing to make a warmed over version of the same 1950s airliner, not just once but twice.

Such wasted money easily dwarfs the cost of the world's best cycling infrastructure.

Can't we have both ?
Actually the military doesn't really have to stop wasting money in order that Britain can afford to invest in cycling. The Dutch have repeatedly shown that even relatively sparsely used rural long distance cycle-paths are cheaper to build than not to build. What's more, cycling has been shown again and again to have many positive effects both in society and even for business.

If Britain could achieve the same cycling to work rate as the Netherlands, this would save British businesses more money than it costs to outspend the Dutch on cycling.

Update May 2014
Quite apart from all the wasted lives, resources and political good-will, we now know that the monetary cost of the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was enough to fund cycling at Dutch levels for at least 25 years. Well managed, that could have been enough to catch up with the Netherlands.

More on this subject
There are now several more posts about the confusion which arises when people attempt to "Go Dutch" without really understanding what has been achieved in the Netherlands.

The calculation for Cambridgeshire in 2005 was for cycling and walking combined, based on figures provided by the same Julian Huppert as now supports The Times' campaign. To be fair, he has called this time fora bit more to be spent than The Times asked for, though it's still less than is required to match the Netherlands.

"Go By Bike - Holland shows the way" - News just in from 1981

In 1981, when the modern renaissance of Dutch cycling was less than a decade old, Mick Hamer visited the Netherlands for New Scientist magazine and wrote about the cycling infrastructure.

He wrote "The Department of Transport has just published its long-awaited consultation paper on cycling. It took two years to write, contains 43 paragraphs, and will do next to nothing for British cyclists."

The article goes on: "The key to safer cycling is to segregate cyclists from the heavier, faster motor vehicles that are their main source of danger" [...] "yet segregation is specifically rejected in the DoT's cycling paper". The DoT's (Department of Transport's) paper from 1981 gave the well worn excuses of there being "not enough space" and that it's "too expensive".

He also wrote that the consultation paper "amply demonstrates that British thinking lags behind that of its continental neighbours."

Yes indeed. And it still does ! Until Britain starts to actually make progress the country will continue to fall behind the standard set by the Netherlands. While campaigners in Britain continue to make the excuse that the Dutch have a head start, the head start simply becomes larger. When this article was published, only eight years had passed since the stop de kindermoord protests which fermented Dutch opinion and caused change to start.

Specific details

"The alternative of running a cycle-path
outside bus-stops would mean [...] an
inherently more dangerous conflict."

The article shows how cyclists are diverted into a bypass behind bus-stops rather than clashing with buses in the same lane. This continues to be the case in the Netherlands as conflict between buses and cyclists is to be avoided at all costs, due to being one of the worst things possible for subjective safety of cyclists. I showed some examples in a blog post last week.

There is talk of a "gentle warning tilt" for cyclists who veer from the path in order to avoid a crash, something which we also see here in Assen in the form of sloped "forgiving" kerbstones.

He also noticed that "where there is space, there is a right filter for cyclists just before the traffic lights" and "where the cycle route is parallel to a main road [...] the cycle route has priority over the minor road".

The article also points out that it was already known that on-road lanes are not so successful as segregated cycle-paths. It also talks of two prestige "demonstration" routes and includes discussion of how it was already recognized that having too few and too widely spread out routes, even if of high quality, is not effective at increasing cycling. This led to the tight grid of cycle routes which is normal today in the Netherlands.

Stats and funding

It really did look like an upward trend in 1981. But sadly
there was little action taken to make cycling grow and
a decline came shortly afterwards (lighter grey).

Cycling campaigners in the UK often appear to be members of what a friend of mine calls the "Everything Is Good Committee". There is a perpetual optimism that cycling is increasing no matter what the stats show. This article also talks of an increase in cycling, however at the time it was written, there had been a genuine increase following the 1973 oil crisis. The same had caused cycling to increase in the Netherlands, but while the Dutch used this as a springboard into action on cycling, nothing changed in Britain and the cycling modal share withered once again.

Unfortunately, they couldn't make the other optimistic claim that injuries were dropping as they clearly were not. The roads of Britain were not designed to keep cyclists safe.

There's also an early example of London trying to "baffle with large numbers". The article notes that actual expenditure on cycling is "trivial" in the UK, but nonetheless, London was making claims about the amount to be spent on the "Ambassador" cycling route as an example of a high level of government support for cycling. The author said about the route that it "channels cyclists into several dangerous junctions" and "at the Paddington end is no more than a collection of signposts along heavily trafficked and unsuitable roads". An aside: the "Ambassador" route dates from before my time in cycle campaigning. I couldn't find any trace of it using Google. Do any readers have details of what this route in London was ? Does it still exist ? (read the comments below. The Ambassador route became part of the never finished London Cycling Network)

Read it
Please read the article in full. It cuts straight to the point, and describes what was wrong with British policy on cycling in 1981. Unfortunately it could also be said to describe what remains wrong with British policy on cycling thirty years later. If you care about cycling, this perhaps will make you angry.

A campaigning perspective
Thirty years ago I was a 15 year old who had for some years had independent mobility because I rode my bike to school, to go out and to visit friends. At this age I was completely unaware of the differences between different countries for cyclists, or that I was in more danger than I should have been due to an indifference to cyclists on the part of politicians and designers which fed its way into how British roads were built.

These days, I'd be a rarity. In the last thirty years, the rate of youth cycling has plummeted in the UK and other English speaking countries. Even walking has dropped as the car marches ever forwards. Parents have assumed a role of being taxi drivers for their children. Without youngsters cycling, where will new cyclists come from ? The government seems not to be too worried. Their solution appears to be to stop gathering the data on how children get to school.

Cyclists continue to die in greater numbers than they need to on the streets of London and the UK in general. In thirty years, much could have been done to improve the safety record of British streets for vulnerable road users, but that has not been done. More importantly for public safety, people continue not to cycle in the UK. The cost of illness and death due to obesity is extraordinary, and cycling is part of the solution as well as being far less costly than dealing with the consequences.

How long do British people have to wait until British roads start to resemble Dutch roads ? I think it's obvious that it isn't going to happen by itself. The only way to get this change is to fight for it. Unfortunately, the New Scientist article did not cause the outrage that it should have done. Not enough people asked "why don't we have what they have". Thirty years later, with cycling having declined since that date, but with communications having improved, perhaps more can be achieved.

Do something about it

The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain came to see Dutch infrastructure for themselves. They are actively campaigning for infrastructural change in the UK. If you're British, please support them. Other countries need to form similar organisations. Only by organising yourselves will change occur, and sometimes it won't come by working within existing organisations which have a different view of cycling.

Support the CEoGB.
They're the best hope
for British cyclists.

Cycling should not be just for young adults prepared for battle on the streets. It should not require a high level of fitness or training. People with disabilities have much to gain from better infrastructure. The safety of children is a very strong campaigning issue and linked to better infrastructure. Cycling should be for everyone.


Come and see for yourself
We'd be very interested in feedback from Mick Hamer, who remains a consultant to New Scientist magazine, or indeed from anyone else who works at New Scientist who might like to come over here and take a look. We've much to show. Perhaps it's time for a follow-up article.

We run study tours specifically to show how infrastructure in the Netherlands works, and how it is an essential part of having such a high cycling rate. If you want inspiration about how cycling could be, come and see for yourself.

Thanks to Mark Wagenbuur who found this old article when looking for something else but let me write about it. The article presents 30 year old cycling provision in the Netherlands in comparison with that which existed at the same time in the UK. While the UK hasn't changed much, Dutch cycling provision has moved on considerably in the last 30 years. Almost all of what was seen in 1981 will have been replaced and improved by now. Progress is rapid. Assen isn't unusual amongst Dutch cities in trying to renew all cycle-paths and roads regularly. In this case every seven years is the target. The upshot of this being that a very good part, almost certainly over half, of the kilometres we ride in Assen now are on infrastructure which is new or improved since we moved here four years ago.

The failure of British electoral reform and how it relates to cycle campaigning

There was recently a failed attempt to reform the electoral system in the UK.

Britain has for many years had a first past the post electoral system. It results in absolute rule by a small majority, and many people don't like this. Due to this system, no vote that I cast in the UK ever counted for anything, as no-one who I ever voted for got any power at all.

Many people would like to see this system replaced by a system of proportional representation which results in the views of the country being proportionately represented in parliament. This has been discussed for many years in the UK, and many people want such a system. No-one's votes would be "wasted" simply because they live in an area where they are outnumbered by people with a different view. The Netherlands has a proportional representation system, as do many other countries, and while there is much whining in Britain that this would create problems, it seems to work just fine here.

Anyway, how does this relate to cycling, and how to campaign on cycling ? Well, the recently lost vote in Britain was not on switching to a truly proportional system, but instead about a switch to using Alternative Vote. This actually is only a very minor tweak to what the country already had, and keeps the problem of the winner-takes-all aspects of FPTP. Frankly, it makes no real difference to the injustice of the voting system in the UK, but merely makes voting more complicated.

The end result of campaigning for something which no-one really wanted and few were enthusiastic about is that nothing has changed. Britain is keeping the old system. According to some, the chance of a lifetime has been lost.

However, frankly, I've rarely seen a campaign less likely to succeed than this one. What a large number of people in the UK wanted was real electoral reform, giving proportionality. There was never, and could never, be huge demand for a very small change to the existing system. The public were left wondering why they should be interested in a mere procedural change. Why bother ?

An "achievable first step" ?
People in the "Yes" group openly talked about this as "an achievable first step" towards PR, even though it's not a step at all. There is no natural progression from AV to PR. No reason for AV to exist before PR is possible.

Reform campaigners had been fooled by the opposition into making a compromise before their campaign got started. As a result, they were asking people to vote for something they never wanted in order to perhaps get to vote again later for something they did want. Naturally, there was little support for voting for something that few people ever wanted in the first place, so the campaign was always doomed to fail.

This has echoes in cycle campaigning. Self-styled "realists" amongst cycle campaigners ask not for what is actually needed and possible, but for what they think is "achievable given current standards". This also will fail to achieve mass support, and fail to achieve even the minor changes that they work towards because they will inevitably be forced to compromise again before implementation. Even the best possible result of such a style of campaigning is that a poor standard of cycle infrastructure results.

Why are both these groups so timid ? Why are they diluting their own message, and therefore losing supporters before they've even had a chance to build a movement ?

Applying the same thinking to recent successful campaigns
Let's consider what other campaigns in recent history would have achieved if they'd taken the same approach:

• Mahatma Gandhi achieved something by actually making a stand. He did not ask for slightly lower taxes on salt, he made salt himself without paying tax. Despite the obvious risks involved, this attracted a mass following.
• Nelson Mandela, with the ANC's Defiance Campaign demanded "conditions which will restore human dignity, equality and freedom to every South African." They did not ask for a slight improvement in conditions, but true equality.
• Martin Luther King said "we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." (read the whole speech. It's powerful stuff).
• The incident with Rosa Parks on the bus didn't end merely with the section sign on the bus being in a fixed position so that she wouldn't have to move in the future, but with the end of segregation on the bus and a good start on ending it in other places as well.
• Harvey Milk didn't ask just ask for gay people not to be beaten up on Tuesdays.

It is possible to get a mass movement behind real change, but not behind irrelevant change. Campaigners need to keep this in mind. When working towards change for cyclists in the UK.

These children in Assen have a right
to safety which is enforced by
sympathetic infrastructure design.

Equality ?
Why talk about civil rights and equality campaigners in the context of cycling ? Well, what else are we asking for but the equal right of cyclists to go about their lives in peace and safety without harassment and danger ? Campaigners must be bold. They must ask for the best possible result they can imagine, not an easy compromise. Compromises might be inevitable along the way, but no successful negotiation starts by asking for less than you really want and nothing good will come of celebrating a bad compromise as if it's the best possible outcome.

The Dutch campaign about child safety was the right approach. It was a big, bold issue behind which everyone could be allied, whether or not they were interested in cycling or "cyclists". This resulted in a reduction in the annual number of child deaths on the roads to a twentieth of the previous figure. That success helped to pave the way for the infrastructure which everyone in The Netherlands benefits from now.


Many people fall into the trap of having low aspirations. Make sure you're not one of them. You don't have so much time as you think.

A look back on British policy. The National Cycling Strategy 1996

I just came across an old copy of the newsletter of my local cycling campaign group from when we lived in the UK. This is the cover of Issue 7 of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign newsletter from July 1996.

We were all very confident back then as the National Cycling Strategy had just been published. The stated aim was "to double the number of cycle trips in Britain by 2002, and to double them again by 2012."

Amongst bullet point items in the strategy were:

1. Develop convenient cycle access to key destinations (has this been done?)
2. Improve cycle safety. (in fact, cycling safety has improved less than other modes)
3. Allocate priority in road space to cycling (British cyclists can judge for themselves whether this actually happened. The much written about london superhighways are not much of an example.
4. Provide cycle parking at all major destinations (London still has less than half the number of cycle parking spaces at all its 50 railway stations added together than Groningen, a city with a 40th of the population, has at one of its three stations)
5. Reduce cycle theft (Has this happened ?).
6. Raise awareness of the advantages of cycling (training courses, "continuing professional development", and also including school cycle training. Sadly, the rate of children being driven to school has risen dramatically since then and more training did not result in more children cycling).
7. Unlock resources to meet the objectives of the strategy (Could that be "jargon" ? I feel that if I knew what it meant I might be able to comment).
8. Set up a national cycling forum, producing an annual progress report

The level of cycling in the UK was under 2% of journeys in 1996 (just the same as now) but if the strategy had been a success perhaps that would have increased to around 8% of trips by this date.

It might have helped if there was a bit more concrete stuff being discussed instead of so many "soft measures", but sadly, of course, the proposals were ignored and the strategy was dropped before it achieved anything. A review was written, which starts with "The Government is committed to encouraging more cycling in England" and carries on to explain that actually they'd achieved no increase at all.

The National Cycling Strategy from 1996 is archived online here. Lots of big words, which led to no real action.

This is one of the big problems with cycling in Britain. It's a talking shop. There are many proposals, much time is consumed in discussing things. However, little actually gets done, and what does get done is all too often done extraordinarily badly.

History to be repeated
At the time of writing there is a new National Cycling Plan for England in the offing. It would be nice to think this was a guaranteed success, but there are already criticisms about it - such as that the aim is to increase the level of expenditure on cycling to a paltry 0.3% of the transport budget. That's really not taking the problem seriously. Is it really too much to hope for a more positive start and a more outcome this time around ?

Update: with the benefit of hindsight it's now possible to report that the National Cycling Plan referred to in the paragraph above came and went very quickly without any obvious progress being made.

It's never too late to start doing the right thing. You just need to actually make a decent start. Until that happens, cycling in Britain will continue to flatline.

Amongst other items in the newsletter were dangerous build-outs on a crossing which was built in a way which was unsafe for cyclists - still unchanged and news that Butt Lane was to be made better for cycling - which didn't happen, though there was recently another inadequate proposal in the same place. This isn't really progress...

Cycling is "booming" in the UK ?

Cycling as a mode of transport in the UK is consistently doing slightly worse than "other" and that's been consistently true for a very long time.

For as long as I can remember, cyclists and government alike in the UK have claimed that cycling is on the up. The expression often used is to say that it is "booming". However, this is wishful thinking. The chart above shows the number of trips per person per year by different modes in the UK from the mid 1990s to (nearly) the present day. The data which is comes from is in this table:

Bicycle trips per year per person in the UK: 18,17,16,15,16,14,16,14,16. There's no upward trend there, just statistical noise.

I blogged about this same table a few weeks back because spurious claims were being made that cycling was getting safer in Britain because of a rise in the cycling rate. Based on the information you see here, some people have claimed that there was a "17% increase" between 2007 and 2008. However, this is a mis-reading of the statistics. There will always be some noise, and this figure for cycling has been bouncing around between 14 and 17 for the last ten years.

If cycling is really to "boom" in Britain it's very obvious what needs to happen. It's also obvious what needs to happen with campaigning. Campaigners must stop being exciting about tiny changes in numbers from one year to the next and stop forgetting that small increases are easily wiped out by small decreases either in different years or in different places. Look closely at any figures like this and there will always be some up and down movement. This creeps into all and any collection of figures. Small changes year on year become apparent even if there isn't a real change. This is especially true when you're looking at small sample sizes and very small figures, such as the 1.6% cycling rate of the UK (and the even lower rates in some other English speaking countries). There is only a real trend when the same thing is seen for many years, and the differences seen are outside the bounds of error.

For a real "boom" in cycling, instead of an imaginary one, it's also quite obvious what is required of the infrastructure. Let's see no more of the junk infrastructure that cyclists have been fobbed off with already. Cyclists in the UK need the subjective safety and convenient conditions experienced by Dutch cyclists, along with vast amounts of cycle parking, bridges, underpasses and traffic lights designed to benefit cyclists, unravelling of cycling routes from driving routes as well as a decent standard of maintenance for cyclists, and all the other things which are taken for granted over here.

Only once a real effort is put into making the conditions right for cycling will people take it seriously as a mode of transport, and only then will the figures head upwards year on year.

And yes, it is possible in Britain. Many people still alive were themselves cyclists before the steep post WWII decline in cycling got underway in Britain. In 1949, not only was cycling a major form of transport in Britain, but at that time, British people covered more distance by bicycle than by car and taxi combined.

Read more posts about campaigning.

Update 2012

Two years later, Joe Dunkley produced the graph on the right as part of an excellent summary of each date since the 1970s when a British minister told the public that cycling was "booming".

Update July 2012
Joe's done more work and discovered that London's recent "boom" may well be in part due to their having redefined what a cyclist is. For a real "boom", actual progress in infrastructure is needed, not just a public relations exercise based on cooking the books.

Update June 2023
More than ten years have passed and there is still no progress (source). The British government gave £2.3B to councils to fund new active travel infrastructure between 2016 and 2022, but do so "without knowing which schemes were good enough". As a result, the four goals set in 2017 for 2030 and 2035 will probably be missed. Only one minor goal, encouraging people to walk a bit more by 2025, could possibly be met. The cycling goal has definitely been missed with levels of activity lower now than when the government’s first cycling and walking investment strategy for England was published in 2017.

Update August 2024
New statistics from the UK government show that cycling is still stagnated in the UK. There were 15 bicycle trips per person per year in 2023, which is no change at all from 20 years ago. It brings me no pleasure to report this.

I'm now approaching my 60s and still feel fairly fit. I still cycle every day, averaging somewhat more than a hundred km a week and I still can cycle over 200 km in a single day without any issues. So it also brings me no pleasure to read in the report from the UK that "Older age groups of those 60 and over are more likely to say that they have a health condition which prevents them from cycling, or cycling more, or that cycling is not for people like them."