London, Boris, the dropping cycling budget, and infrastructure which doesn't work

London: A bridge over a cycle-path which you can't cycle under
for risk of losing your head. 2016 Sustrans/NCN route in London

Through velorution I've learnt that Boris Johnson is behind a sharp reduction in cycling funding in London.

It's another of those stories which actually creates a fog rather than making anything clear. There are various large figures being bandied about, but the LCN+ network funding has been cut in half.

What is Boris thinking of ? Not long ago I pointed out that Boris' transport advisor announced that there "should be no hierarchy of transport users but instead everyone should have the opportunity to use the roads.", when it comes to encouraging cycling.

London: A dead end cycle-path

It sounds very democratic, but decisions that people make on how to travel are based on the infrastructure around them. When the infrastructure which exists has been primarily made to suit driving, as is the case across the UK including London, it should be no surprise that driving is the most popular way of getting about. It's just no good to pretend to be "modally agnostic" while supporting a continuation of current policies which favour motoring.

A diversion of £10M from the cycling budget this year to improve traffic lights simply serves to continue to make driving more popular than cycling.

London: Dismount often

For all the bluster about it, and claims that vast amounts are being spent, funding of cycling in London is really not very high. The recent decision halves the funding for cycling infrastructure to just £10M for this year. There are 8M people in greater london, so that is about £1.25 per person. About €1.50. Is this really enough to transform London into a "true cycling city." ?

London: Dismount here too

London currently has around 500000 cycle journeys per day, which might sound like quite a lot. However, around 8 million people live in the city. Given that the average number of journeys per person per day is a little over 2 in most places, this suggests that around 3% of journeys are by bike in the city.

Assen is a very small city by comparison, with just 65000 people. However, they make between 70000 and 80000 cycle journeys per day. Between 35% and 40% of all journeys are by bicycle. Assen takes cycling seriously and builds good quality infrastructure for cyclists. The cycling infrastructure budget is around €27 per person per year, or £23, and that's for a place which benefits from 30 years of investment.

London: Anyone heard of social safety ?

The photos on this blog post were taken in London two years ago on a ride from Cambridge to the Thames and back. We found these paths were quite popular, but as they don't provide an efficient way of going anywhere in particular and they are not really very high quality, they can only have a very limited effect on modal share. If you want to make journeys in directions other than along the Lee valley you will in most cases be riding on busy roads.

This is why London's cycling rate remains low. The level of subjective safety on routes suitable for making real journeys is too low, and the practicality of routes like this one is also far too limited. Cycle routes need to be both direct and safe. People shouldn't have to choose between safe or direct and it certainly should not be as in London, where the "safe" routes are not really safe and the "direct" routes are not as direct as they could be.

Sadly, the design of transport infrastructure across the English speaking world emphasises driving above other modes. This is why English speaking countries share some of the lowest modal share for bicycles at around 1% of journeys.

2013 update
It had been a while since I looked at this post but the article on the Guardian website which it links to makes a little more sense now. The announcement of the "largest ever" £168m funding package was of course referring in the main to money made available for the "Boris Bikes" bike sharing scheme. This has gobbled up a huge amount of money but of course has failed to make London into a "true cycling city" because as I wrote two years after this post, "a shortage of bikes was never the reason for the low cycling rate of London".

The problem all along was the poor infrastructure and five years after this blog post, London has again been fobbed off with inadequate plans by Boris. The 2013 plan still does not offer enough. It again does not have enough money allocated for it, again much of what is allocated is destined to be consumed by the hire bike scheme, and the target set is for just 5% of journeys to be by bike.

In June 2006 my friend Terry and I cycled from Cambridge where we then lived to the North bank of the Thames in London and back again. It was a practice ride for our Land's End - John o'Groats tour a month later. The photos all come from that ride, and show various aspects of infrastructure which really needs some money spent on it on what is mostly a Sustrans route in London. In order they show a 5' (1.5 m) headroom sign on a cycle route, a dead end, a barrier around which it was impossible to take a bicycle without lifting it and which follows on to a path which is difficult to cycle on, is narrow and shared with pedestrians, a corrugated surface by a canal which provides excellent traction for horses but is painful on a bike and another lack of headroom with a barrier. The alternative route was composed of busy roads. It's pretty obvious that there is a lack of quality here. Sustrans are not helping the UK by rubber-stamping junk.

Ten years later, @seanlondonandon took a photo of the same bridge as at the top of this blog post. It's been "improved" - a metric sign has been added...

Are transport priorities the right way up ?

It has long been the stated aim of many places to have a road user hierarchy in which pedestrians come top, cyclists follow soon after, public transport fits in next and in which private cars come in at the bottom.

However, very few places actually behave like this. Typically there is very little obvious link between what literature states about priorities and what is done on the street.

Tom Vanderbilt recently had a good example on his blog. A sketch by the Danish architect Jan Gehl showing volumes of traffic by mode on a New York street, and how much of the street had been allocated to each mode. It is shown below:

I would be surprised not to learn that a similar pattern wasn't also in place regarding such things as timings of crossings. Typically the average delay for a pedestrian is much longer than that for a driver.

And of course both the allocation of space and the pattern of timings in favour of drivers is repeated in many cities across the world (such as in Cambridge when we found that cycling got just 0.6% of the transport budget) - yet many people wonder why it is that driving becomes the most popular way of getting around.

For cyclists, it's not the same here. There are instances of cycle paths smoother than roads and traffic lights which give priority to cyclists over drivers.

And... it seems that it is possible to do this without drivers rioting in the streets. In fact, of course, such progressive steps help everyone. It makes it easier for more people not use cars, resulting in everyone suffering from fewer of the problems caused by driving, and that in itself makes it easier to continue to turn transport priorities around.

Conditions for cyclists are not perfect here, but they are an awful lot better than in most places. This is the reason why we organise cycling study tours in this location. It's a great place to come and see the infrastructure which features on this blog for yourself, or encourage your local planners or cycling officers to visit. We have the experience both of what is normal in the UK (where street design is similar in intent to the US), and here.

To recap, here are examples of directness, comparisons with the UK, school travel and the important of subjective safety.

Cyclists being given a much greater importance in planning is also one of the reasons why this is such a good place to have a cycling holiday.