While listening to the Never Strays Far podcast last week, I heard British Tour de France commentator Ned Boulting in conversation with writer, adventure cyclist and former cycle courier Emily Chappell.
They discussed the safety, comfort and relief they feel when cycling in a protected bike lane, although there were a few wistful reminiscences about the old days of elbows out and battling through London traffic.
That’s the London cycling I remember and left behind 15 years ago. It’s the London cycling I grew up with, rode to school with and rode to work with.
I was back in London for a couple of months this year, and it’s clear that cycling has changed and grown significantly. Cycling in London started to change under Ken Livingstone’s mayoral term, when he introduced the docked cycle hire scheme in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
This scheme allows you to pick up a bike cheaply for short trips across the city. Livingstone also introduced the cycle superhighway network of wide, protected bike lanes linking outer and inner districts. This was introduced at the same time as the congestion charge, which forced drivers entering central London to pay for the privilege.
Surprisingly, the next mayor, the Conservative Boris Johnson, continued this investment. The rental bikes became known as ‘Boris bikes’ as he expanded the scheme and the cycle superhighways.
Work also began to remove many of the road systems designed in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that prioritised cars over buses, pedestrians, taxis and bikes. Neighbourhoods that had been choked by encircling gyratory systems became places that people wanted to live and work in again.
Whatever else Boris Johnson was, he was also a cyclist. Before he became mayor, his office was in my neighbourhood, and he could often be seen cycling to and from work. He even earned the grudging respect of the cycle couriers who congregated outside the pub I lived above.
In the UK, active transport and the promotion of cycling have become key to the country’s drive towards net zero and the fight against air pollution, which has reached illegal and dangerous levels in cities like London.
The current mayor, Sadiq Khan, introduced the Ultra Low Emissions Zone to make the most polluting vehicles pay for their emissions, and the national government has given local authorities a statutory duty to make space for active transport, such as walking and cycling.
The pandemic has given fresh impetus to the removal of traffic from residential areas. Low Traffic Neighbourhoods have been a feature of London since the 1970s — I grew up in one of the very first — but the pandemic has given people the opportunity to consider what kind of streets they want to live in.
Planter boxes, shared bike sheds, and even kerbside EV chargers have replaced parking spaces. Of course, nothing is perfect and there is still a lot more to be done, but I wanted to highlight the role that active transport can play in decarbonisation and in creating better, more liveable cities.
Last week, we heard that 5 million ICE vehicles need to be transitioned to EVs by 2035. However, what we actually need to do is remove 5,000,000 ICE vehicles from the roads by 2035; what we replace them with is up to us.
Active transport has not received the same level of attention or support as in the UK. Federal, state and local strategies are piecemeal.
We don’t even have clear standards to define what a safe personal mobility device or eBike is, and this has led to fires and deaths. Infrastructure is piecemeal and stops at local government boundaries. There is strong resistance to infrastructure.
There is a commonly held belief that removing parking spaces to make room for bikes or pedestrians will kill businesses.
Let me show you receipts for every purchase I have made by bike. Some of the most misguided people have seized on the idea of a 15-minute city as a left-wing plot to control and contain. Let’s be clear: being able to walk to work, the shops, the doctor’s surgery and the library in 15 minutes or less is liberation, not control.
There is also general scepticism about the role that active transport can play in the uncontrolled sprawl of our sparsely populated cities. Walking is good for trips of less than a few kilometres; cycling is good for a little further.
So what can that achieve in cities that are 100 km wide? Where commutes of tens of kilometres are common? And yet, anecdotally, I have never seen more people cycling and scooting to work in my bubble, my 15-minute city. Food deliveries, packages and more arrive on the back of a bicycle more often than not — people earning their living by riding a bike.
Herein lies the problem.
Australian data on active transport is patchy, out of date and inconsistent. I wanted to write a data-driven article exploring trends in active travel in Australia.
However, even the Australian Transport and Assessment Planning Framework — the toolkit used to evaluate infrastructure investment and enumerate benefit-cost ratios — contains inconsistent and outdated active transport data.
We need to make active transport part of our decarbonisation agenda in this country. It needs to be factored into the urban planning of cities that desperately need to house more people in denser communities, but we don’t even have a clear baseline from which to understand the impact of investment.
London is not perfect; we can’t just copy what has worked there, as we need Australian solutions for the Australian context. However, we can learn a lot, and we must get started.
Ed Lynch-Bell is Principal at Second Mouse, dedicated to building more sustainable energy tech and mobility products, services and businesses. Ed is also a co-host of the Melbourne and Sydney EV Meet-ups, bringing the e-mobility industry together.
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Hear Hear!
It appears that the most common response to the problem of getting an ever expanding population around their cities has been to spend $billions on new roads, while virtually ignoring the alternative, which is to improve cycling infrastructure.
If done properly, this would reduce or eliminate the need for new roads by reducing traffic pressure.