Pushing e-bikes will not result in mass cycling

15-20 years ago the most common objections heard to the idea that better infrastructure was required to enable mass cycling came from people who promoted training of cyclists and vehicular cycling. It was claimed that if enough people could be trained to cycle amongst motor vehicles then no cycling infrastructure was required. Decades have passed and of course no such result was ever seen because the problems which faced people cycling had not been resolved. Meanwhile, those places which built better cycling infrastructure have seen improvements in cycling modal share. The calls for training and vehicular cycling have become much quieter in recent years, but similar calls are now being made for another related idea: That take-up of e-bikes will result in mass cycling despite conditions on the roads not having been improved. This idea has no more validity than the claims made 20 years ago.

If you take someone who is scared to cycle because of the danger of traffic and give them a bicycle they are unlikely to take up cycling just because they now have a bicycle. I pointed out years ago that "a shortage of bicycles was never the reason for the low cycling rate of London" but this applies worldwide. Millions of bicycles gather dust in sheds around the world because their owners don't find riding them on the local streets to be appealing at all.

If you take someone who is scared to cycle because of the danger of traffic and give them a bicycle with a motor, the reaction is very likely to be the same. The source of the fear has not been addressed by adding a motor to the bicycle so they'll still be unlikely to take up cycling.

Dutch parents let their children cycle right into city centres
because it is safe to do so on cycle-paths, not because they
have motorised bicycles.

Parents who are not happy to see their young children ride bicycles on roads filled with motor traffic will be no more enthusiastic about them doing the same thing with a motor on their bike.

Pensioners who are currently scared to cycle on busy roads won't suddenly gain enthusiasm because someone has given them a motorised bicycle.

People with disabilities who use hand cycles or other mobility devices but can't travel far with them because they do not feel safe on the streets are not suddenly going to feel safe to put themselves in front of motor vehicles because they have been given a motor.

Proponents of e-bikes often point to studies which often don't say what they think they say.

A Danish study:
There's a Danish study which is sometimes claimed to show an "11% increase" in cycling due to e-bikes but of course the reality isn't quite like that headline. The study involved 120 people from a city of 61000 who volunteered to be part of a study about the potential of e-bikes. 80 took part in the after study analysis. Of those, 45% claimed they cycled more after they were provided with an e-bike (55% said they cycled the same or less). The 11% increase in cycling which was observed was within the 80 people who chose to take part because they were already interested in e-bikes. That some people who thought they wanted an e-bike turned out really to want an e-bike should surprise no-one. What's more, it's important to note that because these people lived in Denmark they were already in a country which has relatively developed cycling infrastructure and a relatively high cycling modal share because of that infrastructure. They have somewhere safe to ride their e-bikes. This is not a result which has any relevance to a country which does not have cycling infrastructure.

An American study:
There is also an American survey which is popular amongst e-bike enthusiasts, the National Institute for Transportation and Communities North American Survey of Electric Bicycle Owners NITC-RR-1041. A popular website article claims that this survey proves that "e-bikes are getting more people out of their cars". This initially seemed more interesting than the Danish study because it's a study from a place which has little to no cycling infrastructure and great increases in cycling were claimed. If those findings could be translatable to other countries which lack infrastructure that would be very interesting indeed. But I've now read the report and unfortunately there are many problems which arise from it. I will go into these problems below:

Note that while some website headlines are dramatic they're quite loosely connected with the report itself which uses more reasonable language. I suggest that it's important to read the report itself to understand what the survey was and what the results mean. Methodology affects results. The authors are candid and honest about the scope of their survey. They do not claim that it is impartial and nor do they claim that the results can be extrapolated to the population at large. This survey was supported by e-bike manufacturers financially as well as with "input, feedback and efforts on the project to make sure it was successful." The people surveyed were all people who already own e-bikes and over 80% of respondents had owned their e-bike for less than two years when they responded to the survey. We can therefore expect new owners' delight with their new purchase to be reflected in the results.

This survey of 1800 people targeted a self-selected group of people who were found "through e-bike blogs and forums, multiple social media platforms, manufacturer and retailers’ e-mailing lists, and cards left on e-bikes throughout the Portland, OR, area" and as such we can expect many enthusiasts amongst the respondents. The authors don't try to deceive but acknowledge the limitations of their survey. They admit that respondents were not selected randomly and that findings might not be representative even of the whole population of e-bike owners, let alone the population at large.

None of this is a criticism. The report authors are quite clear about what they've done and by presenting their data as they have, they have given an insight into North American e-bike owners. I do, however, criticise some of the websites which have published dramatic headlines based on the survey and some of the people who have taken those headlines and made yet more dramatic claims because the results of this survey have been taken out of context.

It should be noted that most of the e-bikes used by respondents to this survey are too powerful to be recognised as e-bikes in most countries. Only 6% of respondents have e-bikes on which assistance is available only up to the 25 km/h which applies for an assisted bicycle in the EU. 94% of respondents have e-bikes which are more powerful than that. i.e. most of these e-bikes would be classified as "speed pedelecs" in Europe - number plates are required and riders must wear helmets. While only 6% of respondents have the slower EU legal e-bikes, a greater number (7%) have bikes on which the motors are so powerful and can push their riders at such speeds that in Europe they couldn't even be speed pedelecs, but would have to be registered as motorbikes. As such, this study's application to many countries is already limited as it mostly concerns itself mostly with a completely different class of vehicle to that which we would recognise as a legal assisted e-bike in Europe.

The limitations of self-reporting are also exposed. While more than half of respondents claim to be of "very good or excellent health", only a quarter of respondents say that they do even 30 minutes of moderate exercise per day, as recommended widely as a minimum required for good health. 3/4 of e-bike owners do not take 30 minutes of even moderate exercise a day and therefore also cannot be cycling for 30 minutes a day. The most common maximum speed of assistance is 20 mph, suggesting that the distance covered even by most of the respondents who actually do take 30 minutes of exercise per day will be somewhat less than 10 miles (16 km) while most respondents will cover somewhat less distance than this. This puts the report's claim of an "impressive decrease in vehicle miles traveled" in some doubt.

Leading question: Why didn't you cycle before you
had an e-bike ? Choose from one of these answers.

Though the most common reason why people do not cycle is the fear of motor traffic, the multiple choice question which asked about why people didn't cycle before they got an e-bike did not include that as a response. Instead, people were led to give other responses such as that distances were too long for cycling, that hills made cycling difficult or that it was difficult to carry things on a bike. Some respondents specified "other" and then wrote this themselves but it is very likely that this most important reason for not cycling was under-reported due to the design of this question.

The study goes some way to address this by including the following passage, but because it's not an answer to a question it doesn't appear in the hastily written summaries which have appeared on websites elsewhere: "Throughout open-ended responses, e-bike users often expressed insufficient bicycle infrastructure as a significant barrier to riding more (for both standard bicycles and e-bikes), as one participant states, “I don't always have safe infrastructure to get where I need to go. [If that is the case] Then I drive” (anonymous respondent). Some of these barriers to riding a standard bicycle cannot be solved by switching to an e-bike;"

Odd uses for e-bikes
The survey results include many surprising statements from e-bike riders about ways in which they benefit from their bikes which are in fact ways of compensating for poor social policy, poor town planning and poor road/cycle-path infrastructure. Here are some examples:

At least one respondent uses their e-bike to address a social safety issue: “I ride through several homeless camps on my eighteen mile trip. My e-bike gives me a sense of security knowing that I will have the energy/power to get out of the area if I feel threatened or fear for my safety.” This should have been addressed through a combination of a more humane social policy which addressed the issue of homelessness combined with better town planning.

Another says that an e-bike allows overcoming a different problem due to poor town planning: “I live in the suburbs now, so the same errands are much longer distances. An e-bike makes it possible for me to continue to use a bike instead of a car.” Local errands ought to be over local distances. Dutch suburbs are designed to include facilities and encourage cycling.

Some report using their e-bikes to take longer routes than they would otherwise because by doing so the rider can experience less vehicular traffic. i.e. they're compensating for the lack of good cycling infrastructure where they live. Cycling infrastructure should always enable taking the shortest possible route in safety.

Some respondents claim that being able to ride at high speed enhances safety alongside faster vehicles, again compensating for poor infrastructure. Being able to ride as part of the motor traffic is aligned closely with the failed vehicular cycling ideas (it's a strategy for surviving a hostile environment but not a way to create mass cycling). This claim is similar to a popular claim made by drivers of cars that being able to break the speed limit results in better safety, but there is little evidence to support that. Higher speeds are almost always linked to more danger, regardless of the vehicle so I am skeptical that this would work differently for e-bikes. Note that the Dutch experience is the reverse. Pensioners have taken up 25 km/h assisted cycles in quite large numbers to allow them to continue a lifetime of everyday cycling using the extensive country-wide grid of safe cycling infrastructure which they already used on a normal bike. Despite the safety of the infrastructure design and their relatively small increase in speed to a maximum of 25 km/h, the extra speed, weight and slight unpredictability of assisted bicycles has resulted in a surprisingly large increase of injuries and fatalities to older people due to a rise in single rider collisions.

Mopeds and motorbikes
Unsurprisingly, most of the respondents report conflict with motor vehicles. This is a problem for anyone riding a two wheeler in traffic, powered or not). Motorcyclists were using the term SMIDSY (Sorry Mate I Didn't See You) to refer to the incidents in which drivers claimed not to have seen a motorcycle some years before cyclists picked it up. Let's remember that the e-bikes in this US survey are much faster than those which are legal elsewhere.

There's nothing new about making ever faster powered bicycles. People have found ways to put engines and motors onto bicycles thereby transforming them into mopeds and motorcycles for more than a century. People who required something like a bicycle but with a motor attached have been able to legally buy and use those vehicles for more than a century.

Modern e-bikes which assist up to 25 km/h are a new and special case in that their speed has purposefully been made compatible with normal cyclists going about their everyday business and in that the assistance is always relative to force on the pedals. In the Netherlands, slightly faster mopeds are much less popular than bicycles (powered or not) and are commonly considered to be a nuisance to cyclists.

What has been seen in Europe is that people who in the past might have bought a moped are now likely to consider buying speed-pedelecs with speeds up to 45 km/h (comparable with the majority of the US e-bikes) which are classified in a similar way to mopeds, requiring a number plate and a helmet on the rider. A combination of these types of bikes and straight electrically powered mopeds without are replacing mopeds with petrol engines. Because they don't have the same noxious emissions, most people see this as an improvement.

The faster "e-bikes" in the USA are not e-bikes here. That's not pejorative and it's not just an opinion. The law in the EU and this country places limits on assisted bicycles and such high powered machines can't be e-bikes. As a result most of the bikes in the US study would need to be registered and have a number place in Europe, the rider would have to wear a helmet and they cannot be ridden everywhere that a normal bicycle (or 25 km/h e-bike) can be ridden.

In the Netherlands, mopeds are used to make about 1% of journeys and their riders suffer from much the same prejudice as do riders of bicycles in countries where cyclists are the 1%. However I have nothing against speed pedelecs, mopeds or motorbikes. To me they're just other alternative means of transport, all of which leap with remarkable ease over the very low bar of being "better than a car", so while I don't choose to ride any of these things myself, I'm not opposed to them. What's more, I live in a city whose main claim to fame is hosting motorcycle races. This would not have been an attractive location to move to if I particularly disliked motorized bicycles of any type.

E-bikes, 3D printers, metal detectors, smart watches ?
The US survey was carried out in 2017. Over 80% of the respondents reporting buying their e-bike in 2015 or later. i.e. most were recent converts to e-biking. Over 95% report being very satisfied or satisfied with what is for many a new purchase.

Any survey which asks people who recently bought any gadget whether or not they like that gadget and whether or not they use it is likely to report that the people who recently bought a gadget do like it and do use it. It really doesn't matter what the gadget is.

You could run the same survey with accessories for normal bikes, parts thought to enhance performance of normal bikes (e.g. lighter wheels), or even totally different products such as 3D printers or smart watches. This does not invalidate any of those devices, which some people make good use of, and it also does not make the e-bike less valid either.

We should recognise that new owners of pretty much any product tend to be enthusiastic about their new purchase. Regardless of what kind of bike they have bought, people will always report using a new bicycle more than their old bicycle.

Because most of the respondents are new purchasers we have to expect that to some extent respondents self-reported opinions will express this aspect of human nature.

What is the effect on modal share ?
Any claim of a huge shift in how people get around based on this survey has to be grounded in the actual mode share figures. The survey was carried out in the USA and Canada. Unfortunately, both of those countries have staggeringly low cycling modal shares, amongst the lowest in the world.

Before modern e-bikes became popular, fewer than 1% of trips were made by bike in the USA and Canada. After e-bikes became popular this remained under 1%.

Despite their very high population densities resulting in short average trip lengths in comparison with Dutch cities, American cities such as Los Angeles and New York have almost unbelievably low rates of cycling. If you're interested in cycling, there is nothing that the rest of the world really can learn from those places except what not to do.

E-bikes are not a magic bullet which can transform a low cycling nation
In the USA, 40% of all trips are under 2 miles in length but 90% of those short trips are made by car. There's a huge potential win there taking only the shortest distance into account.

The USA used to lead the world in cycling. This bicycle,
produced by an American manufacturer in 1904, is the
sort of practical bicycle used by most people before cars
took over the roads. Modern Dutch town bikes are the same.

E-bikes are simply not required to enable the short journeys which make up the majority in any nation to be made by bicycle. No kind of special bike is required over these distances Even the most basic type of everyday bicycle can cover the majority of most peoples' short trips. The distances are so short that they can be covered by almost anyone at all in almost no time at all, riding any bicycle and without breaking a sweat.

But that is not what happens in North America. Why ? There's no safe space for cycling so cycling even over short distances is neither pleasant nor safe, on any bicycle.

If you can't convince the population to use a bicycle to ride a significant proportion of low single digit distances then it's not going to be possible to convince them to do so over longer distance either.

What can we make of the survey overall ?
The US / Canadian survey has little to no relevance to the rest of the world for several reasons:

• The USA is a particularly hostile country in which to cycle and peoples' motivations for using an e-bike included social and planning issues which hopefully do not apply elsewhere.
• The survey was not designed to be representative of either the population as a whole or even of e-bike owners. Survey respondents were largely e-bike enthusiasts who selected themselves.
• Leading questions in the survey resulted in answers which may not accurately reflect the views even of those who took the survey.
• Any survey of people who have just bought any new product will tend to be positive (see 90% of online reviews of anything).
• The definition of an e-bike is so broad that most respondents are using types of motorized vehicles which are legally in a different class in other countries.
• The claims of large shifts are confined to the self-reported actions of the self-selected few who took the survey. They are not represented in the modal share figures of the countries in which the survey was based.

In short: Surveys of this form can mislead the reader into thinking there has been a transformation in cycling which in reality does not exist. I will note again that the authors of the report are quite open about their methodology so I can't criticise them for this. But because of the points above, this report says very little, if anything at all, which can be translated to any other place and certainly nothing which will assist with increasing cycling modal shares in other nations.

So how can we encourage vastly more cycling ?

The logical way to increase cycling is to look to where there has been real success and copy what led to that success. It makes little sense to try to emulate even the boldest claims made in a country where less than 1% of journeys are made by bike when there is a far better example to look at. In cycling, one country leads the rest of the world by a large margin and the Netherlands is that country.

Forty years ago, city scale experiments were performed in Dutch cities to find out what was required to create a genuine and long lasting increase in attractiveness of cycling and therefore a genuine and long lasting increase in cycling.

After a small upwards bump due to the 70s fuel crisis, cycling
continue to grow slowly in the Netherlands due to new cycling
infrastructure being built. In the UK and other countries, a
decline which had begun with the growth of cars merely
paused and then continued again after the oil crisis

The result was really not surprising - the successful experiment consisted of building a comprehensive grid of infrastructure which connected every home to every destination in the city. This enabled everyone to cycle and resulted in an increase in cycling across all demographics. The same thing was copied across the entire country of the Netherlands and while the efforts are not uniform and nor is the result, the entire country now has a high cycling modal share compared with any other country.

All that other countries need to do is copy the successful experiment, choosing from the most successful Dutch schemes. Once people are enabled to cycle, they will be able to choose a bicycle which suits them. Some will opt for assisted bicycles, some will opt for speed pedelecs, some will choose a normal human powered bicycle. That's all good. But no-one should be forced to believe they need to choose what is effectively a motorbike in order to keep up with other motor vehicles.

Update:
A few minutes after publishing this blog post, the video below came to my attention. It shows an older person with a mobility scooter accidentally riding through the door of a bakery in the centre of Assen yesterday. Many older people who can no longer cycle use mobility scooters to get around in this city. They make use of the many cycle-paths which provide direct and safe routes to the city centre from suburban areas. This incident occurred in a nearly car free street at the edge of an area where no cars are allowed. If this person had made the same mistake in a different place with a lot of motor traffic, or in this exact location 40 years ago, then accidentally riding out into the middle of a busy junction could have been catastrophic.

I've added this video because it illustrates part of what I wrote above about vulnerable people. Once we reach an age where controls on something as simple as a mobility scooter become confusing enough that accidents like this can happen, the last thing that is required is more speed so that decisions have to be made more quickly and more frequently. While it is a mobility scooter and not a bicycle in this video, mobility scooters are amongst the many types of vehicle commonly used on Dutch cycle-paths alongside bicycles and there is a relationship between this incident and how pensioners in the Netherlands have more frequent crashes when riding electrically assisted bicycles. A safer built environment cannot prevent mistakes, but it always helps everyone to be safe even if they make a mistake.

The myth of the "tipping point" and the fragility of cycling.

Birmingham once had much bicycle production
and use. However, like the rest of the UK
this city's cycling declined from the 1950s

It has become popular to make statements about cycling somehow taking on a life of its own and growing without further investment once a particular modal share has been reached. A fairly recent example of this sort of thinking appeared in a grant application document from Birmingham City Council:

"Birmingham is working towards the ‘tipping point’, a common pattern within cities, where a modest rise in cycling levels suddenly gathers pace. We want to accelerate the pace of growth further, creating a visible ‘step-change’ in levels of cycling within our city being part of everyday life and mass participation a reality. Our aim is to achieve a cycling modal share of all journeys of at least 5% by 2023, which research undertaken by the European Platform on Mobility Management (EPOMM) has shown is sufficient to generate the critical mass required to make it an attractive mode of travel. By 2033 we want this to rise to levels of comparable European cities such as Munich and Copenhagen at over 10%."

As is so often the case, they're aiming far too low. A target of just 5% of trips at a point in time ten years in the future ? Attempting to achieve such a slow rate of improvement makes it difficult to measure whether there has been any success at all year on year. It's also a good way of ending up making no progress at all. Nevertheless, this is described as a "step-change".

It is also odd that their aim over 20 years is to emulate countries which have achieved less than the Netherlands, and also that they define "comparable" with Munich and Copenhagen as a cycling rate of 10% of journeys when both those cities are currently at roughly double that level.

But the biggest error is the reliance on a "tipping point". Where is the evidence for the existence of this "tipping point" ? Actually, history shows us that without continuous substantial investment to support it, cycling declines even from a very high modal share.

Examples of decline from a high level

Before 1962, the British made more journeys by bicycle than the Dutch do
now (as a proportion of all distance travelled)

In the Netherlands, 27% of journeys are currently made by bicycle. Because it is mostly shorter journeys that are cycled, that translates to bicycles being used for around 10% of the total distance travelled.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, British people used bicycles for around a third of the total distance that they travelled. This declined steadily and it took until 1962 before the UK dropped to the present day Dutch level with about 10% of distance travelled being by bicycle. Since then, the UK has declined and stagnated.

What happened in the UK to make people switch away from bicycles was a huge programme of investment in infrastructure for motor vehicles while bicycles were mostly not catered for at all. Cycling became less safe compared with other modes of transport as well as subjectively unsafe due to the proximity of an overwhelming number of motor vehicles. Cycling became less desirable as a mode of transport and has become marginalized.

New Towns in the UK provide an example in miniature. Stevenage, for instance, had a higher cycling modal share in the past than it does now. When it was first built, there was (for the UK) a relatively good grid of cycle facilities and these led to most locations. Decades of under-investment, lack of maintenance and not bothering to integrate cycling into newer parts of the town have resulted in cycling having no advantage in Stevenage and that town now having roughly an average cycling modal share for the UK.

The top line shows cycling in the Netherlands by year
The second line shows Denmark. Cycling has been
in decline in Denmark for 20 years

Denmark provides another example. In the 1980s, Denmark had a cycling modal share which was slightly behind, but similar to that of the Netherlands. Both countries were investing similarly and growing cycling at a similar rate.

It was believed that the Danish culture would result in them always cycling. In fact, cycling comes through investment in making cycling into the most attractive option.

Unfortunately, because investment in and prioritization in planning for cycling were not maintained at an adequate rate and the result has been a steady twenty year decline in cycling in Denmark.

Davis in California, which calls itself the "Most bicycle friendly town in the world", is a small city with a size population to Assen (though it's much more densely populated than Assen). The top cycling city in the USA, Davis hosts a large university for its size as well as other educational facilities. A high student population always make it easier to achieve a high rate of cycling and Davis has a high student population even compared with other university cities. While one quarter of Groningen's population are students, and the population of Cambridge in the UK consists of one third students, more than a third of Davis' population are students and a large proportion of the rest of the population are associated with education.

Davis once described itself as "home to 15000 bicycles", but that was when the population of the city was smaller and even more focused around the university. Some people estimate that as many as a quarter of all trips were by bike in Davis in the 1950s but there has since been a well documented decline in cycling to the point where the cycling modal share is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of what it was, with even students cycling less than they once did.

You may wonder how this could have happened. An interesting reply to the last link about Davis points out that they have experienced demographic change which works against cycling (fewer students as a percentage of the total) and many other changes including the retirement of a key city figure with the result that "the city lacks any upper level administrators who are anywhere near as dedicated" to cycling.

Davis is now trying to boost cycling by restricting student car ownership in a similar way to Cambridge - something which cannot be applied generally to all cities, and which won't help much when recent growth to the city's population has largely been due to non-students.

More recently, there's the much documented fall of cycling in China. The term "critical mass" was coined by the film-maker Ted White after he saw Chinese cyclists form into a mass at the side of the road and force themselves across the traffic. This is something which required an enormous number of people on bicycles to achieve. Bicycles were enormous in China, but there has been an enormous decline and that country is now famous for its massive traffic jams.

Cycling declined in both the UK and the Netherlands until
the late 1970s. The Netherlands (top line) reversed the
trend while the UK did not.

Finally, the Netherlands also provides a good example of decline from a high base.

Just like the UK, the Netherlands also saw declining cycling from the 1950s until the mid 1970s as roads were redesigned to accommodate more and more motor vehicles at the expense of cyclists. The UK and the Netherlands followed a very similar decline from the 1950s through to the 1970s (though the decline in the UK reached a deeper point).

Though the Netherlands now has the highest cycling modal share in the world, this country has actually still not grown all the way back out of that enormous decline.

Growing cycling is a slow process, even here. It required an enormous amount of work over many years to achieve a relatively small rise from the dip of the 1970s. The trend to higher cycling levels only came after a second revolution took place on the streets of the Netherlands. Despite a high level of investment, further progress has been slow for the last 20 years.

Just as growth is a slow progress, decline also takes time. The slow rate at which declines occur can hide serious issues of under-investment and bad planning for many years, especially if other factors (e.g. growth due to demographics (students / older people) hides the decline. The Netherlands needs to learn from its own past and take the warning from Denmark (see above) seriously. Cycling is no more "in the blood" of the Dutch than it is of the Danes and cycling will just as easily go into decline here if cycling conditions are made steadily worse. In some places this has already happened due to such things as shared space scaring people off their bikes and other similar mistakes.

If subjective safety is no longer taken seriously enough in the Netherlands then people will stop cycling, the decline which began in the 1950s will continue, and the period between 1970 and 2010 will appear as a difficult to explain plateau on a future version of the graph above.

Assen in the 1970s. Many streets in other countries still look this. If Assen still looked like this then there would not be so many people cycling as there are now. Watch a video of how this street looks now. The traffic lights were removed long ago, but the through traffic went first. Unfortunately, such lessons have been forgotten, leading to new examples poorly designed infrastructure.

So what happened to the "tipping point" ?
From the above examples we can see quite easily that merely having a high cycling modal share is not enough to ensure that cycling continues to grow. Many examples exist of places which have or had a much higher cycling modal share than Birmingham's target of 5% of journeys by bike, but which which have since gone into decline and continued to decline for long periods of time.

All that is required to cause cycling to drop is for conditions conducive to cycling to disappear.

When cycling becomes less safe, less pleasant, less convenient than it used to be, people will switch to other modes of transport.

A bicycle tunnel under the railway
in Assen was constructed in the
1970s with a 5% incline. This is
now considered to be too steep.
The Dutch population is ageing
and requires an ever improving
quality of cycling infrastructure
merely for cycling to stand still
Without improvements, the city's
cycling modal share could drop.

How can we stop this from happening ? Constant new investment and ever improving conditions for cycling. Cycling must be safe, attractive, pleasant and efficient as a means of transport to all locations. Conditions must be such that everyone wants to cycle, not just a small section of the population, because if cycling is only for a brave few then the modal share can only mirror the small segment of the population who cycles.

Because there is no low level of cycling which will grow automatically, asking for little and expecting to achieve much makes no sense at all. Real world results are proportional to countries' expenditures.

The Netherlands spends €30 per person per year on cycling infrastructure even after 40 years of effort in building the required comprehensive network of routes because there is no choice but to do this, because the alternative is to watch cycling decline. However it's important to note that this higher level of expenditure than any other nation doesn't really cost anything. While badly designed and constructed cycling infrastructure costs money and gives few benefits, the benefits due to good cycling infrastructure are greater than the cost.

Remember that even the Netherlands has not yet grown back out of the decline between the 1950s and the 1970s. Denmark's troubles with cycling should be seen as a particularly strong warning to this country. If the Netherlands copies from Denmark then it could very easily suffer the same decline as has Denmark.

But while the Netherlands has no choice but to go it alone and continue to try to maintain the lead, other nations do have a very clear example to follow. The Netherlands is the most successful nation in cycling and it is therefore where the best solutions are likely to come from. However, mistakes have been made even here and it sis important to take inspiration from the very best examples. On this blog we try to help by providing examples of what works and examples of what not to do. We also run regular study tours on which these concepts are demonstrated.

A note about demographics
Locations with universities generally have more cycling than other similar locations. Areas which become the new trendy place for young single people to live (i.e. where a process of "gentrification" or an influx of "hipsters" has been seen) will often see an upturn in cycling. Neither of these things is due to the infrastructure, they are due to the average member of the population being easier to attract to cycling because these demographics are less likely to be put off by those things which would put off other people from cycling.

Demographic factors are always important. Not only infrastructure but also the people that are served by it as well as other factors such as the geography make a difference to the potential of any given location.

The best infrastructure allows any location to fulfill its full potential, whatever that potential might be. Groningen currently has three times as much cycling as Cambridge. However if Cambridge had the infrastructure of Groningen then it might well achieve a higher cycling modal share due to the helpful combination of more favourable demographics, local by-laws banning student cars and milder weather.

At present, Groningen is making far better use of its potential for cycling given other factors, while Cambridge is not.

Update July 2014
I've been writing about the decline in cycling in Denmark for six years and after years of denial, it seems that at last some people in Denmark have started to talk about it as well. This is very good news for Denmark. It is only by recognizing a problem that it can be fixed. Publicity alone does not grow cycling. Pretty pictures don't do it, and nor does international marketing. It takes infrastructural change to encourage people onto bikes. Journeys by bike need to be made safe and convenient.

Update 2015
Read a new blog post about how when it was already in decline in New Zealand, planners ignored cycling and allowed it to wither.

Click here for more posts about statistics and cycling

This post was started some months ago but I finished it today after reading an excellent post on aseasyasridingabike which makes a very similar point about the idea of a "critical mass". Also interesting this week is ibikelondon's piece about the decline of cycling in China. Also read a Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest blog post from 2011 on a similar subject.

Perfect driving will never happen (Campaign for Sustainable Safety, not Strict Liability - part 2)

Cycling campaigners often say things such as that there is "no such thing as an unavoidable accident". After crashes occur in which cyclists are injured or killed there is often an effort to lay the blame on the individual driver who was operating the motor vehicle at the time of a crash. Cyclists in English speaking countries often call for strict liability under a mistaken belief that this will improve conditions for cycling. Many people who call for this law mistakenly believe that the law's existence on its own somehow makes drivers behave better, but this is a misunderstanding. The law in the Netherlands exists merely to address issues of material damage and financial liability. It does not apportion blame and is mainly confined to reducing liability of children.

Bad driver behaviour is undoubtedly a problem for cyclists. Cyclists often find themselves on the wrong end of the result of bad driving and as a result it is quite common for cycling campaigners to urge drivers to take better responsibility for their actions. There are many ways in which drivers of motor vehicles put themselves and others in danger. For example, drivers should never be distracted by mobile phones or by talking to passengers. They should not look away from the windscreen in order to squint at a navigation system. They should slow down if visibility is bad. They shouldn't eat or drink while driving. They should always allow adequate space when passing another vehicle. They should never pass when going around a blind corner, should always slow-down when there is a risk of ice, demist their windows when they can't see properly, not hurry when they're late for work, never look past a pedestrian or cyclist and see only the car further away, never drive too close to the vehicle in front, never become tired and fall asleep. There is a long list of things that drivers should always do and should never do, but though every driver knows that this wrong behaviour is common.

The Dutch highway code exhorts
drivers to pass cyclists with a 1-1.5 m
gap. That doesn't mean they all do it.
What works best is to have the gap
enforced by infrastructure. Dutch
drivers are just as capable of making
mistakes as the drivers of other
nations. Introducing a law does not
reduce how often people make errors.
Building infrastructure which keeps
bikes away from cars does, however,
reduce the likelihood of such an error
killing a cyclist.

It's true that road safety would be improved. Campaigners sometimes refer to this as "low hanging fruit" as they see improving driver behaviour as an easy thing to achieve. Danger faced daily on the roads would of course be reduced if only we could convince all drivers to behave better all the time. However, there is a limit to what can ultimately be achieved and it is my belief that we are already quite close to that limit. Diminishing returns for training effort set in long ago. In Western nations which already have relatively good records for road safety there can be only very slight improvements in safety if driving for large efforts in training and enforcement. No matter how often we call for drivers of motor vehicles never to crash those vehicles and always to behave in a perfect manner, they will still make errors of judgement.

Cyclists are often seen as a misunderstood and hated out-group. Some drivers make unpleasant comments about cyclists, sometimes are even deliberately aggressive. That cycling campaigners see "bad driving" as a crucial issue is understandable because cyclists come off worst in crashes between motor vehicles and driver error is a common cause of these crashes. Cycling campaigners often equate bad driving with deliberate acts however very few deaths of cyclists are actually due to deliberate violence by drivers. Overwhelmingly, deaths and injuries of cyclists are the result of mistakes made by either the driver or the cyclist.

Accidents happen. They will always happen. While many campaigners dislike the word "accident", it is actually correct to use this word other than in the very small number of cases where a deliberate act causes a crash. Humans are not perfect machines and will always make mistakes

Be kind to animals !
While some drivers express annoyance at cyclists taking space on "their roads", the same emotional outbursts are not common between drivers and animals. Animals are not a human "out-group" and the deaths of animals on the road are neutral with regard to interactions between human beings. I think we can learn something from these deaths.

The scale of roadkill statistics is surprising to many people - according to a roadkill study from 1993, an almost unbelievable six million dogs and 26 million cats are killed each year by motorists in the USA. Those are just the "domesticated" animals. Other mammals include 41 million squirrels, 22 million rats, 19 million opossums, 15 million raccoons, 350000 deer. The total number of animals killed on US roads is estimated at one million per day and there are about 200 million drivers in the USA. On average, each driver in the USA kills an animal every seven months. There is no reason to believe that the USA is any better or worse than other nations. The USA is my example for no reason other than the availability of figures for that nation.

Australian warning sign. People drive
past signs like this and then run into
the animals in the pictures. Read an
Australian call for driver education.
Just asking people nicely to avoid
crashing is remarkably ineffective.

While many people might not feel upset about the death of a rat, they don't drive over them in such numbers on purpose. Perhaps more interesting are the figures for the pet animals. Very few people would deliberately harm a dog or cat, yet over 70000 cats and over 16000 dogs are killed by American drivers every single day.

For reasons of self preservation alone it's a good idea not to run into a larger animal such as a deer yet just the state of Michigan reports that "there were 56,666 deer-vehicle collisions in that state in 1994, and each year deer-vehicle collisions in Michigan kill an average of five people and injure 1,500". Michigan's deer collision rate works out as more than 150 per day. Have they not erected signs to tell people where the greatest risk is ? Are drivers not advised to avoid running into deer ? Of course they are. Have these attempts at education worked ? Of course not. Driver education can never result in there being "no unavoidable accidents", people will always make mistakes. Accidents will always occur.

Human beings are fallible
Car crashes are the inevitable result of putting human beings behind the wheels of cars. Human beings simply don't have the ability to behave in a faultless manner so even the most careful people are sometimes involved in crashes. Normal people going about their everyday business with no intention to cause any harm at all are spreading carnage along the roads, not only of the USA (which I picked only because I found the numbers for that country), but also of all other countries.

None of this is new. In fact, it's as old as cars themselves and of course the victims of this violence on the streets are not only animals but also humans. Back in 1896 a coroner who investigated the world's first fatal car crash made his view quite clear by saying that "this must never happen again". Much effort has been expended on preventing it from happening. In the 117 years between then and now, driver education has improved enormously and there have been countless campaigns to encourage safer driving. You may ask what the result of this has been and the answer is that there are now 1.2 million deaths every year due to crashes by motor vehicles. Perhaps a small fraction of these might be deliberate acts of murder, but the vast majority are accidental.

The connection between animal and human deaths on the roads is a simple one to make. The vast majority of these deaths are caused by motorists who are not deliberately dangerous, but who overestimate their ability, misread the road or who are not paying sufficient attention to what they're doing. This is not so much a failing of individual drivers but simply a normal part of the human condition. People are always distracted. We evolved to deal with travelling mostly by walking, occasionally running for small distances, but we're not actually faultless even at walking pace. Who has never walked into a lamp-post, stubbed their toe or tripped up ? Why are we surprised that the task of controlling a motor vehicle at higher speeds safely for long periods of time is difficult for us ? We're not very good at this sort of task and we will always make mistakes. It's not just the occasional bad driver who makes these errors, but normal drivers who have been trained well, passed a test to show that they understand how to drive well, who have been exposed to education campaigns and who drive past warning signs every day on their journeys. These average and good drivers still crash with alarming regularity.

When we pick on an individual driver after a crash has occurred this is an application of 20:20 hindsight. Every driver on the roads makes mistakes. We can't predict which driver will make a mistake next and we can't predict which mistake will turn out to be fatal for a cyclist or pedestrian, or even for the driver him/herself. Punishing an individual for a crash which has already occurred does nothing to prevent the next crash.

How can we avoid making mistakes ?
We cannot address fundamental human failings by changing the law or proposing more punishment for failure while the underlying task that we are asking drivers to perform remains so difficult. Punishment does nothing to address the reason why mistakes are made, which is that we are human and can't cope with the task of driving. Even the threat of heavy punishment won't make people perfect.

The way to address the problem of putting human beings in charge of any dangerous activity is to limit how often they have the opportunity to make catastrophic errors. There is a precedent in aviation .

Sadly, this pilot "flew the aircraft
beyond its operational limits and lost
control". Lives were lost as a result.
If the correct procedures had been
followed, this crash would not have
taken place. The existence of
procedures is not enough on its own
to guarantee safety

Historically, a large proportion of aircraft crashes were the result of pilot error. Pilots have crashed aircraft and often brought their own lives as well as those of others to an end due to such simple human failings as overconfidence and showing off. However commercial flying in particular is now very safe indeed. The improvement in the safety record for commercial flights has been achieved in large part by removing the opportunity for human beings to cut corners and make mistakes. This is the reason why pilots do such things as work through a check-list before they launch themselves and several hundred other people into the air. Check-lists might be boring but they result in a consistent check being made of important systems and any problems with them being spotted before they occur. When in the air, commercial aircraft benefit from several sets of eyes on the controls and from automated systems which sound an alarm and draw the pilot's attention if the aircraft is flying too low, too slow, falling quickly, too close to another aircraft etc. Automated navigation equipment has improved safety by removing human error so that aircraft don't run out of fuel in locations far from their destination. Automatic pilots take over much of the boring flying during which human pilots might lose concentration. Automated systems help landings to be made safely when visibility is not good. It is dangerous if aircraft fly too close to each other so they are kept apart. Small aircraft can be affected by the disturbed air left behind by larger aircraft so they are kept even further apart.

Aviation has been made safe by removing the opportunity for humans to make so many errors. The same principle can also be used on the roads.

In the Netherlands, the principle of sustainable safety is credited with improving the safety of the roads. It is the equivalent of the measures which have been taken in the air. Road designs are made self-explanatory. Everyone knows where they should be without having to read lots of signs. The task of driving or cycling is made safer by reducing the amount of thinking that drivers or cyclists have to do. While this reduces the frequency with which motor vehicles crash, it cannot completely remove human error from driving. Cyclists are kept away from where the inevitable out of control motor vehicles are likely to end up. The source of danger is kept away from those who are most vulnerable. This is how The Netherlands has achieved a better degree of overall road safety than almost all other nations, and a particularly enviable record of road safety for cyclists, pedestrians and children.

How this relates to Subjective Safety

Not just subjectively safe, also
sustainably safe. These cyclists are kept
safe from motor vehicles by the same
principle as keeps penguins from being
eaten by polar bears. Physical separation
from the road reduces the chance of a
driver making an error being able to
injure these cyclists. This creates an
environment in which everyone feels
safe to cycle.

It's fortunate that the same changes to the environment which remove danger from the roads are also in large part those which lead to a better degree of subjective safety. If roads and cycle-paths are subjectively safe then this makes cycling accessible to the public at large. It reduces the anxieties of parents about whether their children are safe to ride a bike. It reduces the anxieties of older people who ride here in increasing numbers and it results in everyone being able to cycle. Merely changing the law to punish errant drivers will not have this effect. It didn't have that effect here either - "strict liability" came some years after the construction of a comprehensive grid of safe cycle-routes which go everywhere.

Campaigning for Strict Liability harms cycling
Strict liability is positive for any country because it determines who has financial responsibility in the result of a crash. In The Netherlands we see no opposition to the law because everyone wants their children to be immune from financial responsibility if a crash occurs between their bicycle and a car.

However strict liability is really a side-show issue for any country where cyclists still do not already benefit from proper cycling infrastructure and where cycling is still a minority pursuit because of the lack of that infrastructure. It's a contentious issue which drives a wedge between cyclists and drivers. Drivers see this as an attempt to blame them for crashes which are not their fault and it is not surprising that they see this as unjust. Many of the people campaigning for the law don't understand what its true scope is and some of the campaigners actually really are asking for an injustice to be made law.

Today's drivers are potentially tomorrow's cyclists. It makes no sense at all for cyclists to put effort into alienating themselves from their potential allies, but this is precisely what is happening with the emphasis on blame which comes through strict liability campaigning. Though the potential benefit is very small indeed, this is still a difficult battle to win precisely because it appears to be unjust.

Strict liability is simply not a worthwhile thing to spend time in campaigning on in countries which face far larger problems. To campaign on this issue consumes considerable campaigning effort for something which can never result in the masses cycling because it doesn't even start to address the main issue standing in the way of people riding bikes. The Netherlands achieved success by transforming the environment to be safe for all road users.

If you want to copy the Dutch success in cycling then you need to campaign for all those things which really made and continue to make a difference in the Netherlands, not just anything described as "Dutch".

A few tens of km South of Assen. Segregation of all modes. Motorway on the far left, local road in the middle, cycle-path on the far right. All pass under a bridge for wildlife which aims to address the problem of roadkill. Segregation of modes is the big thing which enables mass cycling. Just like humans, animals benefit most in safety terms from being segregated from motor vehicles. Wildlife bridges are important because for some endangered species being hit by motor vehicles is one of the most significant causes of death.

What this post is not about Various comments have been made about this post, for example: "David Hembrow says accidents will happen, and there's no point in holding bad drivers accountable". This is, of course, not actually what I said at all and the thread which carried on afterwards went into even wilder diversions from the subject of this post.

There are a small number of genuinely bad drivers. These drivers break many laws and take many more risks than average and of course they feel the force of the law. Ideally they should not be allowed to continue to drive. Some people have even used motor vehicles deliberately as weapons. In these cases an existing law has been broken. Assault with a motor vehicle as a weapon should be treated just as seriously as assault with any other weapon. There may be examples in some countries where where there have been problems with achieving prosecution when a car was used as a weapon and this may well be something worth campaigning about. However, none of this is what I wrote about above because criminals cause but a small minority of the total number of crashes which occur on the roads.

Most drivers are neither particularly good nor particularly bad. When talking about "good drivers" and "bad drivers" we are often actually talking about the result of a perfectly average drivers in an average states of concentration who find themselves in different circumstances from one another. Most average drivers never cause the death or injury of another human when driving. However, most of those who have caused death or injury were no less skilled than those who have not. This comes down in large part to nothing more than luck. An average driver in the wrong place at the wrong time may cause a death. An equally skilled driver who never had the same bad luck might drive for his/her entire life without ever having even a minor bump. That someone could end their life with a perfect driving record does not necessarily indicate that they were a better than average driver; it is more likely that it shows they had better than average luck and found themselves with fewer dangerous situations to deal with.

Handing down particularly harsh punishment on a driver who was involved in a lethal crash after it has already occurred will do nothing to prevent similar bad luck leading to a similarly skilled driver being involved in a similar crash in similar circumstances at some time in the future. Indeed, if the road remains in the same state as when the first crash occurred then this is almost a certainty that the same thing will happen again in the same place if given enough time.

If we wish to address the problem of average drivers' mistakes causing injury and death, punishment is an almost useless response. Even if every drive who has already killed is locked up in prison this won't do anything to stop other average drivers faced with the same difficulties from making the same mistakes. However, changing the road design to make mistakes less lethal will work for all drivers. This is the gist of Sustainable Safety. If you remove conflict from roads and, especially important for cyclists, remove vulnerable people from the path of those in motor vehicles, then safety on the roads is improved.

The safety of roads in different countries is in very large part a function of their design and far less a function of the behaviour of different country's drivers. We're all from the same gene pool and all populations have a similar range of abilities. We all have the same human failings. The difference between the countries on the left and the countries further to the right come down in large part to the standards of road design.

This chart shows overall road safety and does not highlight the safety of cyclists. While almost all oher countries would gain increased safety for their drivers if they adopted infrastructure such as is in the Netherlands, for cyclists the safest place by far is The Netherlands (read footnote at that link). Cyclists elsewhere especially stand to gain from campaigning for the type of infrastructure which is common in the Netherlands, but it's worth bearing in mind that adopting this infrastructure will also benefit all other road users. The benefits of Dutch infrastructure also include keeping drivers from harming themselves and each other quite so often.

A comical interlude
When the new liability law was introduced in the Netherlands, it didn't go without comment. A Dutch comedy team produced this film in 1994. Remember that this happened after the Netherlands already had mass cycling. Nevertheless, many people thought the legal change was a step too far:

Langholm - An example of how British villages are blighted by traffic

The video above was forwarded to me this week. It shows how the centre of the village of Langholm in Scotland is blighted by an incredibly busy road passing through it. The description underneath the video is well worth reading:

Transport Scotland justifies the 30mph speed limit through Langholm High Street claiming it is ''...unsuitable for a 20mph limit due to the strategic classification of the road (A7 trunk road) and that it should be as free from obstruction to encourage the efficient movement of goods and vehicles....''

That Langholm's High Street is part of the route of the A7 - a major route across Scotland - is an historical accident. However, the traffic on the road has clearly grown well past the volumes which are reasonable to send through the narrow streets of a village of 2300 people.


Where it is wide, just as where it is narrow, the main street through Langholm is dedicated to the needs of those who pass through in motor vehicles in preference to those who live in the village. The narrow pavements provide no subjective safety for pedestrians, and this is a very hostile place to ride a bicycle. View Larger Map

Sadly, this is a scene repeated across the UK. Many small and pretty villages are blighted by absurd numbers of motor vehicles which pass through their centres. I am not aware of any situation where a Dutch village puts up with conditions like this. There are plenty of villages which have narrow streets, but they do not suffer the same blight of having these streets used as major thoroughfares by drivers who are just passing through and will never stop to discover the delights of the village itself.

I'm reminded of the village of Grafhorst in the Netherlands which I have cycled through on a few occasions. This has a population just half that of Langholm, but residents benefit greatly from the bypass which prevents the N760 from blighting their lives. It is safe for children from tiny Grafhorst to cycle to other villages in order to attend school. There are some images below:


Approaching Grafhorst from the South, the N760 is diverted to the East. Cyclists take the original route through the streets in the centre of the village. Drivers who wish to visit Grafhorst turn left here (as the blue car is doing) View Larger Map


The main street in the village is therefore free of through traffic. Even the Google Maps car went no further than this. A cobbled road surface, raised platforms and strategically planted trees help to persuade people not to drive quickly. View Larger Map


On leaving the other side of Grafhorst there is a cycle-path to the next village, much used by children and adults alike. View Larger Map

Note that the N760 is not so busy as the A7 and that speed limits outside the villages are restricted to 80 km/h maximum, and often 60 km/h rather than the 60 mph / 100 km/h normal across the UK.

The signs look similar, but they are not. In Langholm the speed limit is 30 mph / 48 km/h while in Grafhorst the speed limit is 18 mph / 30 km/h. That is the normal speed limit in the Netherlands for roads in villages. However, it is the removal of through traffic that makes the village streets pleasant.
Residents of Langholm are campaigning for little more than a lowering of speed limits through their village to 20 mph (32 km/h). It's a start, but they're not asking for remotely enough. While such volumes of traffic are allowed, even at a lower speed, they will continue to dominate the village and continue to affect the lives of those who live there. This village needs a bypass, and by bypass I mean something which keeps through traffic completely away from the centre rather than the British concept of a bypass which sadly often serves only to provide a parallel alternative route.

A bypass would of course be expensive. However, at this time the money is available. Billions have been set aside in the UK for infrastructure spending in order to stimulate the economyy. It can be spent on pointlessly increasing the capacity of roads between the places where people live or on improving the conditions of those who currently are blighted by roads which are already too busy. It is for British voters, councillors and politicians to decide on the most sensible way to spend that money, in Langholm and every other afflicted city, town and village.

Streets just as narrow as those in Langholm abound in the Netherlands. Because they are never used as through routes for motor vehicles, they are pleasant places for people.

These changes need to be made not only for adult drivers passing through or for those rare adult cyclists who "brave" the conditions, but in particular for the most vulnerable members of our society, children, older people and those with disabilities.

If we're not interested in improving the lives of the next generation then who are we campaigning for ?

30 September update
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some correspondents from the UK made excuses of the usual form about how Langholm is "different" from the Netherlands and therefore a bypass would be difficult. It often seems to be assumed that everything is easy in the Netherlands simply because of the relative lack of hills, but nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, engineering here has been on a grand scale. The Dutch have built some of the world's longest dykes and the world's largest moving barrier. They also reclaimed land which forms the world's largest artificial island, and run trains though tunnels in soft ground below the water table. Just in the last few years in Assen we've seen a canal moved sideways by 2 metres to make space for a secondary cycle-path, and a bridge carrying a dual carriageway built to keep cars out of the way of cyclists. There are now plans to dig a tunnel to remove cars from the outside of the railway station. Major projects are common in the Netherlands even in small towns because they make life better. The only real difference is in the will of the people to demand decent infrastructure.

Rattenberg. Transformed into
a pleasant place to live.

Of course, people still point at the relative lack of hills as if this excuses inaction in the UK. However a correspondent sent me a helpful example of a village in Austria which is a similar position to Langholm. Rattenberg used to have a rat-run through its centre, which is now rather attractive as shown to the right.

Rattenberg was transformed by building the Rattenbergtunnel which bypasses the centre of the city by passing through a hill. Exactly the same approach could be taken in Langholm.


Grotere kaart weergeven

Finally, this blog is not just about Langholm and the problems in the centre of one small settlement. Rather, my interest is in the similar situations in hundreds of small towns and villages across the UK and in other nations, each of which are blighted in a similar way, regardless of the relative difficulty in removing their through traffic. The low aspirations of many campaigners make it easy for too little to be done to resolve problems.