Getting cyclists "out of the way of cars": is it wrong?

This post is related to a marvellous post on As Easy As Riding A Bike, which discusses the traditions of cycle campaigning in the UK, and, in particular, the "No Surrender" (of the right to use the highway) attitude which originated in the 1930s and continues to be a major force in determining attitudes of British cycling organisations today towards cycling provision, good and bad. I urge you to read it, if you haven't already done so. It's long, and if you have even more stamina, you can read the comments as well. The second most popular post on the present blog, 1934: The moment it all went wrong for cycling on the UK from 2011, was on a similar theme.

What concerns me in this post is the argument, related to the "No Surrender" one, that we should not be aiming to "get cyclists out of the way" of motor vehicles. This has gone down the ages. As Easy As Riding quotes The Times from 1934 reporting a conference on road safety:

The Cyclists’ Touring Club stated that the provision of cycle paths at the side of any of the main roads would not be with the object of giving cyclists a good path on which to ride, but to remove them from the road in the interests of motorists.

So we have the from this stage association of "the interest of motorists" with the convenience, safety and relaxation of traffic-free cycle paths, as if the former were an undesirability so huge that it necessarily trumps the latter. The sentiment is effectively: "A cycle path might be lovely for cyclists, but it might also help motorists to go faster, so we can't possibly have that".

Taking this theme up to date, see, for example, CTC's recent campaigners' briefing on Cycle Friendly Planning & Design (that I have quoted before). On Page 3, under "What cyclists want", it says that, according to the results of CTC's survey, one of the things they they want is:

To feel valued, not "kept out of the way of the traffic"

So again there is this opposition being set up between benefiting cyclists and benefiting motorists. If cyclists are valued, then they will not be "out of the way". And when I have heard Roger Geffen, the author of this document, talking about the results of this survey, this has been a point he has always emphasised: "yes" to segregated cycle facilities, in the right places, if they are good enough, but "no" to  just "getting cyclists out of the way" of motorists.

The trouble is that the one effect of constructing segregated tracks on main roads, where segregated paths are most needed, must be to "get cyclists out of the way" of the motor traffic flow. But why is this seen as such a big deal? Why is it seen as wrong?

It's partly a matter of language, of course, of phrasing, the way the situation is expressed. Deliberately negative language is being employed by the cycle advocates quoted here. One, more constructive, way of thinking about the segregation of modes is to say that we are "segregating cars away from people". And there is always a pro-safety argument to segregation, for any of the modes segregated, foot, bike or car. If you make each flow uniform in terms of speed and momentum, as nearly as you can, which can never be achieved when mixing modes, then you reduce the change of serious damage occurring as a resault of accidents. This is one of the principles of Dutch philosophy of sustainable safety. 

If motorists do not have the worry of how to negociate around bikes, vehicles with very different characteristis to their own, it takes one stress away from them and one source of unpredictability in their enviornment, a thing that they might well welcome, and a thing that might actually be beneficial even to their safety. But does that make it wrong? Are cycle advocates supposed to be so opposed to motor culture in all its forms that anything that is done that might make life easier or safer for motorists must be opposed whatever possible benefits it might also have for cyclists? And yes, if we get cyclists "out of the way" of cars, then, on some roads, in some circumstances, that might cause cars to go faster. It might result in smoother journeys, and these might be more fuel-efficient. Lesss pollution might be generated by a road traffic composition which allows drivers to cruise rather than have to break behind cyclists and then accellerate to overtake them. Is all this wrong?

Now, in the early stages, the period of the 1930s in Britain discussed above, I think part of the driver for the "don't get cyclist out of the way of cars" attitude was the frequently poor quality of the cycle path alternative that was on offer: though whether there was or was not generally a more fundamental philosophical objection behind this, such that no quality of cycle path would have been good enough for the leaders of cycling, it was the "principle of the thing", is open to debate. And of course the quality of cycle facilities continues to be the big issue in the UK, as this blog has continually pointed out from the first. But we do see the same objection raised, weirdly, even when the quality of the provision for bikes is world-class, and the results massively successful in transport policy terms.

Here's the example which actually prompted this post. Mark Wagenbuur posted on his blog Bicycledutch a piece about a new flyover for bikes that has been constructed at Enschede. It looks rather good. It allows them to cross a main road without interaction with the motor traffic at all, replacing what used to be a signalised crossing. It allows more capacity for bikes, because they don't stack up at the lights, and it takes away a delay (replacing it with a slightly longer journey as cyclists have to cycle a curved ramp to get up to the flyover). Of course, there are equivalent benefits to motorists. Because the crossing is eliminated, the capacity of the road is increased, motorists' journeys are speeded-up, and their journeys are likely to be more fuel efficient, because they do not have to stop here anymore.

So basically here you have major infrastructure dedicated to cycling, constructed at great expense, to totally separate cycling form the motor flow. Something you get a lot in the Netherlands, the word's most cycle-friendly nation: there are other good examples on the same blog. So, to quote Anna Soubry, Health Minister, giving evidence to the all Party Parliamentary Cycling Group Enquiry yesterday, "What's not to like?"

Well, something, apparently, for some cycle capmaigners in the UK. It's the old "we don't want to be got out of the way of traffic" thing again, isn't it? Richard Mann, cycle campaigner from Oxford, advertised the post about the brige in Enschede on his Twitter feed in this way:

Cyclists given a long looping ramp in Enschede so they don't hold up traffic http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/cycle-bridge-enschede/ … >Hmm

And in the three letters of that "Hmm" lie a distillation of a century of "attitude" in the relationship between cycling activists, motorists, and infrastructure in the UK. The example here is a slightly new type, as this is not the old business of objecting to the "pushing off" of cyclists on to paths, the paths were already there. Now the Dutch are going further, as they are increasingly doing all over their country, and  separating by level to completely divorce the cycling experience from the motoring environment, rather than relying on the old methods  (old for them, but still not much adopted in the UK) of signals to share space at different times on the level road crossings. The objection now seems to be that this is taking away some "function" of cycling in limiting or controlling traffic or "civilising the environment", and you see this very often in British and American writings on sustainable transport.

I have actually changed my position on this one. I used to be very sceptical of the idea of engineering mode separation by level, particularly in cities, because I associated it with the kind of community severance I see in north London, near where I live, riven by the North Circular Road, dominating the landscape, that pedestrians, and cyclists if they can manage it, given the total lack of specific provision for them, must burrow under in dank holes, or fly over on windy walkways, to cross. And London and other British cities are full of this kind of thing. I wrote in my article about a successful German cycling city, Münster's Cycling solution, published in the April/May 2009 edition of London Cyclist, the following:

Cyclists [in Münster] are treated as a proper flow of traffic, integrated into signalised systems. There are generally not multiple levels of transport infrastructure, as beloved by British traffic engineers. Space is shared at surface level, and cyclists and pedestrians are not inconveniently forced up and down over bridges or through underpasses. Motor traffic is made to give way as necessary to give the sustainable modes enough priority.

So, like many now, at that time I was uncomfortable with the idea of accommodating flows of cyclists, pedestrians and motor traffic in cities through separation by level. (I heard this model of urban planning described recently by an LCC activist as "the last refuge of the scoundrel".)

What changed my opinion was seeing just how well the Dutch are doing this now, and what it can do for the cycling environment. I didn't believe, before I went on the study tour in Asssen with David Hembrow, how totally it is actually possible to separate cycling and motor flows, and how nice that makes the cycling experience, by removing almost all the delays you get in other systems, and even removing quite faint, but significant, environmental impacts on the cycling experience from the motor flows, like the noise, the smell from exhausts when cars are held at signals, the tension of judging timings at intersections, and the agitating effect of having heavy machines at speed pass you by not very far away, even when you have segregated tracks. The Dutch are increasingly taking all this away from the cycling experience, and the effect is that everybody wants to cycle in the environment so created. So, whereas four years ago I would have argued that problems like the North Circular Road crossings should optimally be solved with surface-level crossings to reunite the severed communities, now I would prefer to see this kind of thing that we saw in Assen:

A recent innovation in Assen: where there was previously a level intersection between the motor trunk road and the cycle road, there is now no contact between them. The road is elevated and isolated behind noise barriers.

The Dutch model, make no mistake, has been the most fantastic success in achieving very high cycling levels, around 20% of all journeys, in a country where most people can afford cars. It's a success that is not totally dependent on the technology of bridges, underpasses, roundabouts, signals and tracks, but that is a very large part of it, as anyone who has experienced it, or read the blogs  Bicycledutch and A View From The Cycle Path will know. But, at least in the UK, and probably elsewhere, we have a strand of opinion that wants to reject this technology for other reasons. We see it very strongly in the writings of Bob Davis, founder of the Road Danger Reduction Forum. Much of what Bob says on that site I actually heartily endorse, and many of his writings have been very influential on my thinking in the past. But Bob's interventions on the As Easy As Riding A Bike blogpost are classic of this "Not out of the way" strand of thinking.

It's like there is another agenda going on behind this cycling thing. You may have thought that when you get on your bike, you are just using it as a cheap, efficient and fun way of getting from A to B with minimal invasion on the pleasure and convenience of anybody else. But no, in a fundamentalist "pro-integration of all forms of traffic" world-view, what you are doing is serving a higher function. You and your bicycle are helping to control the motor traffic. You are making it go slower and you are "civilising the street". No matter that you didn't ask for this job, it is YOUR JOB, as a sort of Holy Responsibility, to sort the whole world of transport and the urban environment out, and "civilise the street" by getting on your bike. You are just the instrument of this method of civilisation of the city. YOU are The Martyr.

The thing is, most people just want to ride their bikes, and not have to interact with motor traffic, and they don't think it's their job, when on two wheels, to "get in the way" of cars and slow the traffic. Many British traffic planners seem to think it is, witness the rash of road narrowing schemes in London, where a stated objective is often deliberately to allow insufficient space for cars to overtake cyclists in the narrowed lanes, so cyclists regulate the speed of traffic. I am one with many other cycle bloggers who think this is a terrible policy that will do nothing for the attractiveness of cycling.

Now, don't get this wrong, I do believe we should have slower, more civilised city streets. I do believe we should have more genuine "sharing" of space on streets between drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. But doing that, I think all the successful European models conclusively show, involves reducing motor traffic to a bare minimum on streets (as opposed to roads for movement, of which the road in Enschede with the cycle bridge and the road in Assen with the cycle underpass were examples), and enforcing very low speeds through both policing and design. So achieving that "sharing" and that "civilisation" is mostly about actually removing motor traffic, in practice, and what that means is the deployment of the technology of segregation in its various forms, providing routes round urban centres that are specialised to take the heavy through-traffic from one place to another, with suitable alternatives for pedestrians and bikes, and unravelling modes so that the streets you want to be civilised in town centres are actually dominated by human traffic. To get that dominance, you have to allow safe and pleasant mass cycling, cycling for all, regardless of determination or willingness to act as "human traffic calming" or "street civilising material". For that you need all the apparatus of segregation, of low speed limits, of preferential treatment and priority for cycle traffic. You need quite a lot of engineering. All the experience of cycling systems the world over shows this.

The trouble is in part that people have different agendas, and campaigns for more or safer cycling can get wrapped up in all kinds of other political objectives. I take the view that the car is here, with us, to stay, for a long time yet. We can't abolish it, but we can get people to make smarter travel choices, and only use it when it really is the most sensible mode for the purpose, and walk, cycle and take trains at other times, for the vast majority of their journeys. We need to employ the best methods we can to do this, and we need to do the things that have been actually shown to work to get people on bikes in societies similar to our own. We can't solve all the problems of the world and of the environment in this one step, and we can't get rid of private motorised transport. We can engineer its environment so that it is less intrusive on our cities and countryside and less obstructive and less discouraging to the sustainable modes.

It may well be, indeed it is the case, that sometimes, in the history of debate on these things, the most rabidly petrol-headed of commentators or law-makers has been in favour of the construction of cycle paths ands tracks principally in order that cyclists should be got out of the way of their motorised activities. But that is not an adequate reason to go on opposing proven solutions which demonstrably can create a better transport environment for all, more inclusivity of mobility, and innumerable health and social benefits. That is a simplistic politics of reaction – "My enemy thinks it is good, so I must oppose it" – not reason, that we need to move beyond.

For ultimately the "not out of the way" mentality is a motor-centric one. We don't think it unreasonable to keep bikes and pedestrians "out of the way" of trains or aircraft. Why not? It's that this "not out of the way of cars" concept depends on the thinking that "in the way" is necessarily "where the cars are at". In other words, the contention is that the roads that cars are presently occupying are the basic, central social territory that other transport modes must not cede to them. But it doesn't have to be regarded this way.

The Netherlands show us another model, one that's actually workable in an advanced industrialised society much like ours. Cars can be pushed out of our towns, and out of the residential and social areas of our cities, if we wish it, to a considerable extent, and their principal arteries, while recognising they need to continue to exist, can be made irrelevant to cycling and walking by parallel provision. Clearly we are a long way from this in the UK right now, but so were the Dutch 40 years ago. (This in a way was what British motorway-building was all about, though that didn't solve our problems because of other policy failures.) The argument about getting bikes "out the way of cars" can be made irrelevant, because "where the cars are" is no longer critical territory for everyday non-motorised living, any more than the railway lines or canals or docks are. There's a paradigm shift in thinking that I'm alluding to here. But if cycle campaigning continues to obsess about "not getting us out of the way" of the cars, we'll continue to be be stuck in the same old loop.

Cycling revolutions

This, again, is a long blog post that I started many months ago, and just got round to completing. Some of the statistics may now be updateable, with new data, which I will be interested to hear about, but, so far as I know, any new data don't change much that I have to say here. In the meantime, both At War With the Motorist (back in April) and As Easy As Riding a Bike (just the other day) have published pieces which cover which cover a certain amount of similar ground, and I recommend you to read those as well.

Joe Dunckley, in his notebook, has been doing a great job of collecting quotes from past parliamentary debates on cycling, going back to the 1980s and 90s. The titles he puts on the posts makes the point of this: titles like "more from the archives of history repeating", "yet more from the archives of the cycling revolution". For when you read these, it all sounds like it was said in the  parliamentary debate on cycling we had just back in February 2012.

Simon Hughes, 27 April 1984:

It is encouraging that in this city, part of which I represent, where one would imagine cycling to be the least acceptable form of transport because of the hazards and the heavy traffic, there has been a cycle use increase of about 20 per cent. per year in the past four or five years. Cycling now makes up approximately 4 per cent. of all trips. The interesting additional statistic that is thrown in is that cycles comprise 25 per cent. of all vehicle flows at some major junctions. I did not realise that they were that thick on the ground, but that is the trend.

Lynda Chalker, 16 May 1985:

Cycling has always been popular with the young. In recent years, it has become more popular with adults. I am told that bike sales now outnumber car sales. The reasons are clear. Cycling is a cheap, personal and healthy way to travel. For many local journeys, it can be the quickest. On those grounds alone, I am glad to see the increase in cycling popularity.

John Bowis, 23 November 1989:

I do not know how often my right hon. and learned Friend pedals to work, but I am sure that he agrees with me that the growth in cycling as a form of transport is very welcome.

Anthony Steen, 16 November 1990:

Great progress has been made in our major cities to provide for cyclists. I think that about 90,000 cyclists come into London every day, and the number is increasing. Are the Government going to make progress, so that cars are cleared off the principal routes and cycle tracks are provided throughout the capital, so that we can get about much better on two wheels than on four?

This kind of thing goes on and on. The point has been made by other bloggers before, and I have discussed it before. Actually, I don't need to be shown the quotes. I was there, cycling in London in 1980s. I remember this stuff.

In the UK, certainly as long as I can remember, we have been in a perpetual state of declaring a New Dawn for cycling, a new Bicycle Age, a Cycling Revolution, or some such phrase. And we are always getting cycling levels being declared to be on the up, and increases in cycling in our cities the like of which nobody has ever seen before. And yet the statistics say this:

Compiled by Jim Gleeson

Or, in the similar but not identical graph in the BMA's Healthy Transport = Healthy Lives report that takes it to 2010 (this graph is not per person, so population increase has an effect):

All those quotes, and many more like them, come from the period when cycling was in gentle decay from a small temporary high that it achieved in 1982. There was another temporary high in 1976. These two can be seen to be quite significant changes on the general post-1970 baseline: increases of about 70% on that. What was the reason for them? The first high followed the oil price shocks of 1973-4 and the stock market crash in the same period, which led to the 1970s recession. The second high followed the 1979 energy crisis which led to the early 1980s recession. We can see that cycling does well in recessions, and modern recessions have been triggered by large increases in the price of oil. The same effect, one may reasonably conclude, has been occurring in the last few years.

Oil price change 1966-2006 extracted from graph by TomTheHand on Wikipedia

It is slightly intersting that cycling declined 1977–79 when the price of oil did not. It seems like cycling is related to the rate of change of the oil price rather than its absolute level: in other words, there is dynamic adjustment, and when the price of oil has held constant, cycling continues to fall, for whatever reason: because of an intensification of anti-cycling planning policies in the 1970s, perhaps. Since 2002 the price of oil has risen relentlessly.

Here is another graph, and one which seems to partially contradict the earlier ones:

From TfL Travel in London Report 4

It seems from this that on the major roads in London at least, cycling increased very significantly during the first decade of the century, from an average in the 1990s of about 0.27 to 0.48 in the units of this survey, a 70% increase (but not the "doubling" often mentioned). However, the DfT's figures are somewhat different. This is taken from Healthy Transport = Healthy Lives again:

The trends are the same but the amplitudes are not. The change here is from a 1990s average of around 280,000 vehicle miles to 390,000, a rather more modest 40% increase. I don't know why these two assessments of cycling change in London are so different. There has clearly been a noticeable increase, but its scale is often exaggerated. And I do believe the increase has been an almost wholly central and inner London phenomenon. From where I sit, three miles from the edge of the urban area on the north-west side of London, there has been little detectable sign of an increase in cycling in the decade I have been living here. I don' have separate time series graphs for outer London that cover the last decade unfortunately, I only have the data that Jim Gleeson extracted from the censuses to 2001, and that only covered cycling to work, not all cycling. That showed that trends in outer and inner London have historically been completely opposed.

Cycling to work is always the most robust form of utility cycling. The 0.3% of all school journeys in Brent by bike tells its own story.

It may be that other major city centres have experienced cycling increases similar to that of London, but, again, I have no data on these. The fact that the national growth in cycling over the same period appears to have been so modest suggests that either the London case is unique, or it is not, but there has been a counterbalancing decline in suburban and rural areas, as in the earlier historic pattern in London. In any cases, it seems special factors must have been operating in London, not generally replicated across the country.

If we look into motor vehicle flows in London, we find this:

From TfL Traffic levels on major roads in Greater London

Driving peaked in 1999, a year when the oil price was near its modern bottom. There was another peak in 2006, which was also a peak year for cycling; perhaps this was an effect of the London bombings of 2005 frightening people off public transport, though it seems delayed. Otherwise there has been a decline during this century.

I reach a few general conclusions from all this.

Firstly, we've never had a "cycling revolution" in Britain when people have said in the past that we were having one, and there's no good reason to believe we are having one now.

Secondly, without significant change to the cycling conditions, in terms of the infrastructure provided for cycling, there is a rough correlation between the price of fuel and and the numbers taking up cycling. This may not necessarily be a direct causality in terms of people being priced off motorised transport, but an indirect link through the general state of the economy and amount of disposable income people have.

Thirdly, as less people drive, more people cycle. This is not surprising. The two modes share many characteristics, including independence, self-reliance, and door-to-door character, and thus appeal to the same desires in people and to the same "types" of people. There is likely to be an interchange between the two. Also, of course, it could be that less motor traffic on the roads makes people feel it is safer or more pleasant to cycle, though this is more doubtful, since it could also lead to an increase in average vehicle speeds through less congestion, which would mitigate against safety.

If we are relying on higher fuel costs and less traffic to lead to more cycling in the long term, however, I think we are taking an exceptionally risk bet. There is a respectable expert opinion that 2013 or 2014 may see energy prices starting to head down again. An enormous amount of new energy capacity is going to be opened up in the USA, which may well become independent of imported energy in the near future. This will affect world markets and oil may become cheaper again. There may be a global economic recovery, and motor traffic, as it generally does in economic recoveries, may start to rise again in the UK. I have never particularly believed in the theories either of "peak oil" or "peak car". We have yet to see, but I would not be surprised to see all these trends going into reverse in the next 18 months. Our cycling upturn, slight as it is nationally, without massive reinforcement from improved infrastructure, of which there is little sign, could easily collapse.

I'd like to consider the concept of "traffic reduction" further, and its relationship to the promotion of cycling. In cycle campaigning meetings and briefings one hears and reads of this "traffic reduction" concept an awful lot. It's pretty much a universal article of faith amongst campaigners, not only for cycling, but also for the vaguer notions of "liveable cities" or "streets for people", that "traffic reduction" is what we must aim for, as a primary goal. It's often given as a "first ask" in policy papers and positions put to government. In the CTC's Hierarchy of Provision for cycling, which I have criticised in detail before, "traffic volume reduction" is placed as the top option, the first preference amongst the measures recommended for encouraging cycling on roads:

I was in fact at a meeting of cycling, pedestrian and "liveable streets" campaigners not long ago when the chair of the meeting stated as a self-evident, incontrovertible fact (in his opinion) that whatever else people in the room may disagree on, they must all be able to agree on the desirability of "traffic reduction" as a primary aim. In fact he went so far as to say there could be no place in such a meeting for anyone who disagreed with that. So I left.

For, ever the contrarian, I think this is simply the wrong way to address the problem. I believe cities would be nicer if they had less traffic certainly, but to demand "traffic reduction" as a primary aim, a first step, is to get the necessary causalities inverted. It won't happen like that. For one thing, if you ask politicians for traffic reduction, you are asking them for a negative thing,  for a reduction in a quantity that they associate with activity, industry, prosperity and freedom. They may say they agree with you that there is "too much traffic", but deep down (with the exception of a few Green politicians) they don't believe we should try to suppress motor traffic, in general, for the benefit of cyclists and pedestrians. Ask for "traffic reduction", as a fist aim, from a conventional politician, and you are on to a loser.

Traffic reduction, as desirable as it may be, short of economic collapse, which I don't think we want,  can only come about through modal shift to the bike and bike-connected public transport (such as trains with bike parking or bike hire at the stations). Walking cannot take up many of these journeys. The modal shift has to start first before traffic starts to go down. Traffic reduction should not be the primary aim as it is not the first step in the sequence. This is where the CTC Hierarchy gets it profoundly wrong.

The first step, the primary thing to call for, is not traffic reduction, but separation of bikes from motor vehicles. CTC, and with it, many other cycling and sustainable city campaigns and campaigners, can't quite move themselves over to this new paradigm, to make this leap, because their entire history has been one of fighting for something else: peaceful integration. Call it "mutual respect", call it "shared streets", call it what you will, it's a concept with which I, for one, have made a decisive break, having seen what actually works to achieve virtually everything I want to see for cycling, and transport more widely, in the Netherlands (in its most developed form). What works is separation. Separation allows bike traffic to be bike traffic and motor traffic (in the sense of significant flows on distributor roads) to be motor traffic, without interference of the two modes with one another or mutual compromise, and with far higher levels of safety. Traffic in Dutch towns can be "tamed" as a political reality because the mode shares are so different there, and the rock on which the cycling mode share is built is comprehensive separation from motor traffic. The vast majority of the population will not consider cycling at all without that. Then you have elements like lower speed limits, woonerven, stricter liability, etc., as extras on top of all that.

(It is true that the CTC have now stated talking about segregation more, because their members have demanded it, but they are talking about it with the degree of commitment of an alcoholic being dragged to a temperance meeting, saying only they will "support segregation where there is the will to do it well", which doesn't exactly sound like an agressive campaign for the conditions needed for mass cycling. In reality I think they still cannot get their collective head around the idea that cyclists and motor vehicles should in general have their own, separate space.)

Separation, as practiced in the Netherlands and other successful cycling places, works in a wide variety of ways of course. It can be effected using cycle paths away from roads, cycle tracks and lanes on roads (with necessary junction signalling arrangements to create separation in time where cycle and motor traffic flows must cross on the same level), bicycle streets, and almost traffic-free access roads. Even without the building of cycle tracks or new cycle paths, traffic systems can be rearranged so that the routes for cyclists and drivers are comprehensively separated, and, as Mark Wagenbuur and David Hembrow have often explained, this is a major part of the Dutch solution, particularly in older urban areas that were not originally designed around the bike.

I'm a segregationist, not a traffic reductionist. I'm not a campaigner for less mobility, or less travel, or less economic activity. In a sense, I don't mind whether motor traffic reduces or not, because I know that with comprehensive segregation, it doesn't matter to cyclists what motor traffic does. That's of course a narrowly, selfishly pro-cycling position, because we do need traffic reduction for other reasons, not least for reducing pollution and greenhouse emissions. In practice, I know that a modal shift to cycling will cause traffic reduction, and that this will make many other desirable changes to our towns and cities politically practicable.

I know that many other cyclists think the same way as me. I recall a comment by a cyclist, on a thread on another blog which I can't now find, and so can't quote accurately. It was a response to a policy discussion on all these issues I am dealing with here, on the position of the CTC, the Hierarchy of Provision, and so forth. That cyclist said something like "I wish the CTC would stop going onbout traffic reduction. I cycle to work on a main road with a huge amount of traffic. I don't care about traffic reduction. I just want a road designed so the drivers can't keep trying to kill me."

When I first started saying, in London cycling circles, that segregation was what we needed, one of the standard counter-arguments was "But you can't have it everywhere". My response tended to be, either: "Well, or course, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try it in some places, to see what the effect is", or: "Of course, we don't need it everywhere, we only need it on a sparse network of a few routes, to attract hesitant people into cycling". But I see now that I was too conservative. Those critics were wrong. It is possible to have separation everywhere. It's the system today in the Netherlands (which it was not 20 years ago, so I can be forgiven for having been a bit too cautious then). And it is desirable too.

It took the Dutch long time to achieve, and there are still a few bits left to fill in, where there is still not separation of cyclists from significant flows of motor traffic, but that's the principle they are working to, as part of the doctrine of sustainable safety, and in most places they have achieved it. "Separation everywhere" does not mean that cyclists never encounter, or never have to negotiate with, motor vehicles, but it does mean that the major flows are always separated. Cyclists still must, of course, encounter cars, driven slowly in general, on access roads, but there is simply not the jousting for space on through roads that is the bread-and-butter of cycling in the UK. You are never placed in the position of being on a potential collision course with fast motor traffic, as you are constantly on UK roads. This was achieved through separation, not through having a primary aim of motor traffic reduction. Traffic reduction has come about because people have felt it is safe to cycle. That has caused a modal shift and allowed, politically, more and more space to be transferred to cycling.

To start to separate you do need to start to take space away from cars, particularly in city centres. That reduces the capacity for motor traffic, which itself is likely to force some traffic reduction, as congestion is self-limiting. But to say we need traffic reduction to get people cycling is to put the cart before the horse. And to say we need to reduce traffic before we segregate (as UK campaigners have sometimes done) is also wrong.  More cycling does go with traffic reduction, but that's a trivial observation, a sort of transport parallel of the scientific principle of conservation of matter (or "mass-energy" in physics). You get more of one type of thing, you've got to have less of the other, because, in the transport case, people have to continue to be able to get around. The observation doesn't solve the problem that people don't want to change when the alternative seems unattractive. It leaves us just, in the essentially un-engineered UK case, with an economic balance, with people moving over to cycling because motoring or public transport becomes unaffordable, and that trend can, and probably will, change direction at some point. And it won't give us mass cycling anyway (more than a few percent mode share), without an economic and social upheaval.

Putting faith in a cycling revolution built on traffic reduction owing to peak oil, peak car, or other economic or social projections I fear is a weak gamble. If we want a cycling revolution, we have to engineer it, with tarmac, concrete, bridges and underpasses, signs, signals, and law enforcement. That's the lesson I take from the histories of cycling in the UK and in the Netherlands.

CTC in a policy muddle

There's been a certain amount of CTC-bashing here of late, and also in other places. But I think CTC have a very difficult job to do. I really do. They have to be an "inclusive church". They have to reflect a very broad spectrum of views from within their ranks as to what cycling policy should be. This is in contrast to the position of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, which started as a movement of bloggers and cycle campaigners dissatisfied with the policies and performance records (in terms of improving cycling conditions and getting more cyclists on the roads) of existing organisations, like CTC, LCC and Cyclenation, and thus started from an ideological (in the best sense), not an inclusive standpoint. The Embassy doesn't have to reflect the views of those who disagree with it. They can just not support it, as they wish.

And some UK cyclists, quite a lot in fact, do not support the Embassy's, and this blog's, pro-cycling infrastructure stance. Some take a spectacularly different view. In response, I think, to my post yesterday, where I called on the new Road Safety Minister, Stephen Hammond, to

achieve far more emphasis on the provision of safe, high-quality, separated cycling infrastructure for cyclists in the UK

I had a Tweet from Andy Kewell (@VexedVeloist), who had this to say:

Sorry, but I want to ride where I want when I want by whatever route I want. I totally disagree with CEGB's segregation policy.

 I responded with:

Have you actually seen what it's like in the Netherlands Andy? How you have a great choice of routes, and they're all safe.

To which he responded:

Segregating cyclists off the roads is victim blaming, restricts choice of route and panders to drivers 'owning the road'.

After I retweeted his original tweet to my follwers, there developed an enormously long Twitter argument between Andy and others of the "Embassy persuasion". It would be too cumbersome to try to reproduce this here, and inappropriate, but I mention this for several reasons. One reason is that I know that this blog has quite a few Dutch readers. It is often very hard for the Dutch to understand quite what the "problem" is in UK cycling circles – to understand where the argument around separated infrastructure comes from in this country – and why cyclists here (and perhaps even more in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) can't seem to speak with one voice to government to demand clearly what they want.

I would like them to be able to appreciate it, for the more they do, the more, perhaps, they will be able to help us.

For Andy's views, which are not that unusual amongst UK cyclists, of course, embody a total, profound misunderstanding of the nature of the Dutch cycling solution, or paradigm, and a complete misunderstanding of what the Cycling Embassy and allied groups are campaigning for. Nobody holding these views can possibly have read thoroughly, and understood, the arguments advanced in this blog, or on the Embassy website, or on the Dutch-based English-Language cycling blogs A View From The Cycle Path (David Hembrow) or BicycleDutch (Mark Wagenbuur).

Moreover, they clearly can't have experienced cycling in the modern Netherlands themselves. Well I happen to know that Andy lives in Southend, Essex, which is just a shot train journey, or a 60 mile bike ride, from the port of Harwich (the ride would be partly on very dangerous and almost unavoidable trunk roads, of course, like the A120, for this is the UK). From Harwich one gets in one sea hop to the Hook of Holland, and from there, on wide, convenient, safe, fun, cycle paths, of course, to the rest of the Netherlands. I hope Andy makes that journey some time.

It can be quite difficult, because of the culture differences, not because of the reality, to deal with this "big issue" some British, North American and Australasian cyclists have about the "choice of route" and "being banned from roads", if they have not seen and experienced the reality of cycling in the Netherlands for themselves. David Hembrow has a good stab at getting over this mental block of theirs in his post on unravelling of modes:

Should our intrepid cyclist defy the sign and cycle with this bus and van [behind the noise barriers], he/she would simply find another set of traffic lights four hundred metres from this one.

Fighting for the "right to ride" on roads such as this one would be a meaningless gesture. No-one is interested in doing so, because it makes no sense at all to prefer to ride in those conditions. This is a road which exists to deal with the consequences of cars.

Another way of putting it was stated by a Dutch person on a blog comment I read somewhere, sometime, which I recall as something like:

For a British cyclist to come to the Netherlands and say to a Dutch cyclist "How do you cope with being banned from so many roads?" is a bit like an American coming to the UK and saying: "You know that socialised national health system you have over here? Does it actually prevent you from doing open heart surgery on your grandfather in your garden shed if you want to?" 

Laugh Out Loud: the point being that both questions prove to be comically irrelevant to the person to whom they are addressed, who understands the national infrastructural and cultural background.

Sorry, "right to the road" freaks, but cycling is banned on this road in Assen because it makes sense to ban cycling here. The road is going into a tunnel under a railway, but the excellent two-way cycle tracks on both sides of the road make the ban completely irrelevant. But such examples, away from the motorway network, are rare.

Though I don't know if he is member of not, the CTC clearly feels it has to accommodate the under-informed views of people like Andy. Hence, I suspect, their problems and contortions around policy. These have been extremely-well illustrated by the correspondence recently on a post of The Alternative Department for Transport blog, in which I and the two senior policy-makers at CTC, Roger Geffen and Chris Juden, have had their say.

The discussion there got on to the CTC and DfT-approved formula for cycle provision in the UK known as the Hierarchy of Provision. I, and the Embassy, are opposed to the Hierarchy of Provision. We think it makes no sense at all as a policy. For a clearly-argued dissection of why this is, see At War With the Motorist (Joe Dunckley). Here is the Hierarchy, lifted from the CTC website:

Consider first	Traffic reduction
	Speed reduction
	Junction treatment, hazard site treatment, traffic management
	Reallocation of carriageway space (e.g. bus lanes, widened nearside lanes, cycle lanes)
	Cycle tracks away from roads
Consider last	Conversion of footways/footpaths to shared use cycle tracks for pedestrians and cyclists

A correspondent on the Alternative DfT blog questioned why Dutch-style high-quality segregated cycle tracks on main roads, which seem to to be, to so many people, the critical "missing ingredient" that the UK needs to adopt to begin to properly accommodate cycling, appear to be discouraged by CTC by being either placed near the bottom of the Hierarchy, or not mentioned at all, depending on your interpretation of what the unclear terms in the last two rows of the Hierarchy actually mean. (If they are cycle tracks, they are not away from roads, those are cycle paths, and if they are shared use, they are not proper Dutch-style dedicated cycle tracks.)

This is the kind of thing for which the CTC/DfT Hierarchy of Provision seems to find no place, the segregated but not shared-use cycle track alongside a road, in this case, Royal College Street, Camden, London.

Chris Juden then came up with this reply, which I quote in full:

The Hierarchy of Provision is lifted straight out of DUTCH planning advice. THEIR top priority is to create calm neighbourhoods where people can live, play, walk and ride bikes in safety and only drive motor vehicles with great caution. They call it a Woonerf. Outside the Woonerf, if the traffic speeds and volumes are low, they still don’t separate bikes from cars on quiet country lanes for example. Slightly busier low-speed roads get on-highway cycle lanes (a whole lot wider than UK ever provides of course), but Dutch PRIORITY is to make those roads less busy: interrupt them (not for bikes though) and send through traffic another way. 

Separate sidepaths are a last resort for the Dutch too. They are provided where the road simply must carry significant traffic at a much higher than cycling speed. 

All this is in Hembrow and Wagenbuur, but they concentrate on the separate sidepaths because that’s the most concrete difference between what they have and what we don’t have. 

No actually it isn’t. There’s something else, involving a whole lot more concrete that Hembrow and Wagenbuur completely ignore. The Dutch motorway network. The Dutch can close roads to through motor traffic to create Woonerfen and reduce capacity on other roads to make room for high quality off carriageway cycle tracks because they have not been shy about building ring roads and motorways for the displaced traffic. Go onto Google maps and check out any Dutch city. I challenge you to find any part of any city that is more than 10km from a motorway or does not have a complete ring road. Now go look at London on the same scale. Or any British City. They all still depend upon general purpose roads to get traffic around through and out of the city, roads on ancient alignments that provide the line of least cycling resistance but intersect in maelstroms like Bow and cannot be equipped with good quality cycle infrastructure so long as so much motor traffic has to go that way too. It’s a problem for anyone who wants cyclepaths but opposes new road schemes, which is probably most cycle campaigners.

It's hard for me to know where to begin in trying to answer Chris here. I can live (as I have to) with the odd correspondent on Twitter, like Andy Kewell, completely misunderstanding the Dutch paradigm, but when an almost equal incomprehension is displayed by a senior policy person at the UK's largerst cycling organisation, it is deeply disappointing, and it shows all too clearly why the Embassy had to be founded.

So let's start at the beginning, and take this apart bit by bit. It's going to be a long process.

Juden: 

The Hierarchy of Provision is lifted straight out of DUTCH planning advice.

Words may have been copied, but nationally-specific understandings and assumptions often underlie simple words, and mislead. Clearly a massive misinterpretation has taken place in translation from whatever the "Dutch planning advice" was to its interpretation in CTC/DfT policy, as the Dutch do not "consider last" segregated cycle tracks as a solution for busy main roads which cyclists need to use. Such tracks are near-universal in the Netherlands now on such roads.

Juden: 

THEIR top priority is to create calm neighbourhoods where people can live, play, walk and ride bikes in safety and only drive motor vehicles with great caution. They call it a Woonerf.

Complete nonsense. The Netherlands is not some fairy-land dedicarted to "calm neighbourhoods where people can live, play, walk and ride bikes in safety and only drive motor vehicles with great caution". The Netherlands is a modern industrialised nation with everything any other similar nation has: high-speed roads, railways, tram and busways, industrial waterways and docks, and huge-scale industry, retail, and industrial agriculture. This is all accomodated by Dutch planning. It ain't a fairyland. It's a working and very economically successful country, surprise, surprise! But the overriding principle, where cycling is concerned, is separation from motor traffic. Anyone who spends any time cycling there can see that, and feel and experience it – whatever the CTC, or even contextually misunderstood Dutch planning guidance, say.

Amusing cartoon, CTC, but let's have a bit less of the fairyland, and a bit more understanding of how it actually works in a real country only 127 miles away.

True Woonerven cover a tiny percentage of the area of Dutch towns and cities. They are areas where the streets are dedicated to walking and play, the top speed is "walking pace", and they have nothing whatever to do with the facilitation of fast, efficient bike journeys on the high-quality, backbone cycling infrastructure, which will be elsewhere (though small cycle paths will always connect housing in the Woonerf to that infrastructure). They are not the normal or default treatment for residential areas either. There is a total misunderstanding here of the nature, scale, and role of Woonerven evidenced in Chris Juden's statement.

This is serious transport infrastructure in the Netherlands, this kind of thing is a "top priority" there (to mimic Juden's language of claimed priorities) and it has absolutely nothing to do with woonerven. If you think this is not Dutch "top priority", consider, why was the canal on the right moved two metres sideways at vast expense to accommodate this cycle track?

Juden: 

Outside the Woonerf, if the traffic speeds and volumes are low, they still don’t separate bikes from cars on quiet country lanes for example.

Actually, they do if they need to! Go and look. It depends what you mean by "quiet", of course, but, if there is demand, if it is an important road for cycling (especially for children to cycle to school on) and there is, by UK standards, any significant motor traffic on it at all, they separate. Everywhere.

There's only a few cars a minute on this country road near Assen, but that's enough to warrant separation with cycle paths.

Juden: 

Slightly busier low-speed roads get on-highway cycle lanes (a whole lot wider than UK ever provides of course), but Dutch PRIORITY is to make those roads less busy: interrupt them (not for bikes though) and send through traffic another way.

No it's not. Dutch priority is to separate cars and bikes. Go and look and experience. Juden is confusing several classes of solution here: cycle lanes on roads that have significant traffic (usually in suburbs, where the roads have not yet been rebuilt to the latest fully-segregated standards), cycle lanes on roads that have nothing except a small amount of essential access traffic on them (usually in town centres), and cycle lanes on "bicycle roads" that have to provide access to a few residential properties as well, and are there to emphasise the "cycle priority" aspect of the road. In all cases it's not about "making roads less busy" in the sense in which that phrase would be understood in the UK context. It's about reliable, full separation.

Here's a "bicycle road" with cycle lanes that turns into a totally car-free cycle path. It is only not totally car-free for the section in the foreground because it provides access to some houses, but it's virtually as good as if it were, and the advisory cycle lanes indicate cycle priority.

Juden: 

Separate sidepaths are a last resort for the Dutch too. They are provided where the road simply must carry significant traffic at a much higher than cycling speed.

I've already dealt with this one. (But I am not sure why Juden adopts the American terminology, from Forester, of "sidepaths". We call them "cycle tracks" in the UK.) It makes no sense to call something a "last resort" where it is the automatic, univeral solution for a certain type of road. To put it like this, in English, and in the British context, is simply misleading. The whole concept of a hierarchy of provision makers no sense, from this perspective. Decisions on appropriate solutions for any road have to start from a decision on the function of a road, not from a universal template hierarchy. The Netherlands is a modern industrial nation, as I have said. It needs big, fast roads for transport. Sometimes, as in the UK, these have to coincide with the only available cycle route, for reasons of geography or history. The difference is that the Dutch always provide the high-quality cycle track, the British almost never do.

A cycle track like this on a major through-road like this (between Assen and Groningen) is not a "last resort" in the Netherlands, it is the only solution that is used in these circumstances.

Juden: 

All this is in Hembrow and Wagenbuur, but they concentrate on the separate sidepaths because that’s the most concrete difference between what they have and what we don’t have.

Well, no they don't, and no it's not. Read them and make your own mind up. If you search A view from the cycle path under "segregation without cycle paths" (one of the options offered in the right-hand menu) you get article after article explaining most carefully the other options in the Dutch cycle planning armoury. The differences in the way minor roads are organised in towns and cities is at least as profound a difference between Dutch and British practice as is the provision of cycle tracks. As Hembrow explains:

Over the last few decades, the Netherlands has unwoven the networks of car and bicycle routes. If you compare routes for the same journey by bicycle and by car, then in very many cases you will find that the two routes are very different to one another.

Again, the over-riding policy is the separation of bikes from motor traffic, whether its through cycle paths, cycle lanes, cycle tracks, cycle roads, or separated routes that use a whole battery of measures in their completion.

Juden: 

No actually it isn’t. There’s something else, involving a whole lot more concrete that Hembrow and Wagenbuur completely ignore. The Dutch motorway network. The Dutch can close roads to through motor traffic to create Woonerfen and reduce capacity on other roads to make room for high quality off carriageway cycle tracks because they have not been shy about building ring roads and motorways for the displaced traffic. Go onto Google maps and check out any Dutch city. I challenge you to find any part of any city that is more than 10km from a motorway or does not have a complete ring road. Now go look at London on the same scale. Or any British City. They all still depend upon general purpose roads to get traffic around through and out of the city, roads on ancient alignments that provide the line of least cycling resistance but intersect in maelstroms like Bow and cannot be equipped with good quality cycle infrastructure so long as so much motor traffic has to go that way too. It’s a problem for anyone who wants cyclepaths but opposes new road schemes, which is probably most cycle campaigners.

No, Hembrow and Wagenbuur don't ignore motorways. You can search A view from the cycle path again for references to motorways, and a huge number of illuminating articles come up, often on topics most British cyclists would never have thought about, such as how noise from motorways is kept away from cyclists (and residents). And you can read BicycleDutch's explanations of how cyclists are guided through, over and under motorway junctions and networks.

But once again, here, there are errors and misinterpretations in terminology leading us astray. For while the Dutch do have the huge roads that we in the UK call "motorways", of course, most of their "motorways" are not this. They are the equivalent of a certain type of British A-class road. The Dutch do not have an equivalent category of road to the UK "A" road, because the UK's category would be too broad for them, covering, as it does, such a vast range of road-types, from six-lane, "motorway-in-all-but-name"-type trunk roads, through densely-active shopping streets in towns, down to heavily-trafficked two-lane country lanes and little-used single track roads in remote areas such as the Scottish Highlands.

The Dutch have built the bypasses and ring-roads as the British have. But they did something crucially different at the same time. They made motor traffic take those new roads, and didn't leave the old roads open, without altertation, in the fatally-flawed way that the UK did, so just adding motor capacity. At the same time, Dutch planning, over many decades, separated roads by their function, so those roads defined as "motorways" (which need not be very wide roads) were specialised only to take through motor traffic, not to provide direct access to shops and schools and workplaces. The category of "access roads" was developed to do just that, provide that access, but not to transfer traffic at the same time between districts.

The doctrine of the mono-functional road became part of the framework of sustainable safety, and cycle networks were enabled in large part by the removal of much traffic from roads defined as outside the motorway network by this ongoing programmne of the separation of functions of the diffrerent classes of road. The process is not complete of course, and is not perfect. But it has created "main roads" strikingly different from their UK equivalents, where so many functions are attempted to be accommodated on such roads simultaneously: through-traffic movement, access to shops, schools and businesses, bus routes, cycle and pedestrian routes.

The DfT website has this picture as a banner on their "roads" pages as I suspect illustrating something they think well-designed, but it's  a typical British multi-functional road (The Cut, London SE1), attempting to do too many jobs ineffectively.

So nearly everything now seems to be different in the Dutch road and street fabric from how it is in the UK's. It is hard to adequately summarise the differences in a short essay, and, again, I urge everybody to go and see it for themselves. The huge contrast, with so many things being different at once, poses a challenge of interpretation and explanation to UK audiences, and it becomes remarkable to reflect that these nations are only separated by 130 miles of sea. People like Juden are confused because so much is different, and they pick out certain things which they think are critical differences, when they need to better interpret the whole.

Where Juden says:

I challenge you to find any part of any city that is more than 10km from a motorway or does not have a complete ring road. Now go look at London on the same scale.

I do so, and I find that because of the separation of functions on Dutch roads, large and small, and the differences of road definition, this is not a meaningful challenge. There are places in London more than 10km from a motorway (but not my house, which is 2km from the M1). But they are not more than 10km away from a road that Dutch planners, in all probability, would have re-interpreted and planned as a "distributor road", gradually removing its direct access functions, over time, had they been in charge here since 1950. So we've got a long-term planning challenge here, of that there is no doubt.

I am certain that we will never make the UK's roads quite like Dutch roads. It's a different country, and differences, including some major differences, are certain to always remain, for reasons cultural, topographic, geographic, economic and political. But we could start to take parts of their best practice and interpret them as best we can into what we have. As I have seen done in some of the very different cities of Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, and has no doubt been done in many places that I haven't visited. To start with, we need to stop so strenuously finding reasons "why it can't be done here". Come on, CTC, let's have some vision!

Segregated cycle track on main road, near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not flat here. And it's not Cycletopia, but it's much better than the UK.

The London Assembly and Safety in Numbers

Last Tuesday's meeting of the London Assembly's Transport Committee, which included its second session examining cycling safety, was quite fascinating. The previous session had allowed a considerable number of people to have their say, including representitives of the LCC, CTC, British Cycling, and the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain (including me). In this second session the speaking guests were restricted to a few "experts": Dr Rachel Aldred, Director of the Sustainable Mobilities Research Group at the University of East London; Karen Dee, Director of Policy at the Freight Transport Association; Ben Plowden, Director of Planning for Surface Transport at TfL; Steffen Rasmussen, Head of Traffic Design, Municipality of Copenhagen; and Roelof Wittink, Director of the Dutch Cycling Embassy. 

To have had these two last mentioned addressing the Aseembly Members was I think particularly remarkable. For people like me have been saying to London local government for decades that we need to get some experts from those European countries where very high cycling rates have been achieved to explain to us what is actually needed (if not to put them actually in charge of making the necessary changes, which would be even better). This was the first time, to my knowledge, that something like this has actually happened: that any level of UK Government has sought advice on cycling from experts from the continent. This is a very welcome and long overdue development.

The exchanges can be heard on a (very long) webcast available on this page*. Another blogger has already commented on the contribution to the debate of Richard Tracey, Conservative AM. I'm not going to give a full account of the session here, but I've transcribed, in a very approximate style, missing a lot out, but keeping, I hope, a fair essence of what was said, a few points that I felt were highly significant from around the 1 hour 50 minutes mark to the 2 hours 10 minutes mark.

In this section of the debate, Assembly Members were asking the experts about trends in cycling levels and cycling safety in London and elsewhere, and about the concepts of "Critical Mass" and "Safety in Numbers". Ben Plowden, questioned at length on the London statistics, had held to the the view that safety for cyclists in London was getting better over time, taking into account the increasing number of cyclists, with the particularly large number of deaths last year (16) being possibly only a statistical "blip".

Darren Johnson AM, to Roelhoff Wittink: 

In the Netherlands there's been a growth in cycling, but there hasn't been a comparable growth in casualties as there has been in London. Could you say something about that? 

Wittink: 

Cycling grew in the 70s and 80s because of our policies, and safety increased along with it. It has to do with the level of cycling but also with the measures that you take. 

Johnson: 

Do you put it down to a critical mass of cyclists on the road? 

Wittink:

That's a very important  explanation, but, also, if you move people from driving to cycling, you have fewer people causing the troubles for cyclists on the roads. Segregation where you have more than 30km/h is very important. We also disconnect the main routes for cyclists from the main routes for cars, so you have less intersections where you have both high volumes of cyclists and high volumes of cars. I had a look at some your roundabouts, some kilometres from here. The roundabouts we have in the Netherlands slow drivers down but your roundabouts allow drivers still to have a speed of 40km an hour – that's really impossible for cyclists. 

[Steffen Rasmussen is asked to comment] 

Rasmussen: 

There might be something about a critical mass of cyclists, we need more reasearch on the issue of critical mass, I don't know of any research specific to Europe. Infrastructure is extremely important, and we have a lot of work still to do in the City of Copenhagen. 

[Comments are invited from others, and Racheal Aldred speaks] 

Aldred: 

You expect trends in deaths to get better year on year because health care gets better, but when you compare modes, you see it's becoming safer year on year for those in cars, but for cyclists the improvement is much less. I think it's important to compare casualty rates for different modes of travel. The casualty rates for London per kilometre is 30 times greater for cyclists than for car drivers. That's a very big disparity. Comparable figures from the Netherlands (from SWOV) gives you a figure of 4 to 1. It's around 25 to 1 for the UK as a whole. There's an issue there, as we are trying to get people to switch from cars to cycling. In the Netherlands last year there were 4 right-hook deaths in the whole of the country, with their much higher cycling rate. They are doing something much better.  

I want to say something about "Safety in Numbers". This idea has been much discussed. A paper by Jacobsen in 2003 was the original use of the term "Safety in Numbers". He used five data sets, but three of them are cross-sectional, so there is a methodological issue; you can't tell whether you are getting the number of cyclists from safety or the safety from the number of cyclists, because it's at the same time. He used two other data sets that are longitudinal that give you a better insight into that. One of them was from the Netherlands, where he found as you got more cyclists, you did indeed get safer cycling, if you look at at a time series. Interestingly, the other data set was from the UK. He found but data for the UK was very different. It was all over the place; it wasn't showing a consitent improvement in safety related to the number of cyclists. I could talk about this at much greater length than I think you want to hear. There are many mechanisms likely to be going on. I don't think you can say more cyclists always leads to safer cycling. There are different mechanisms going on. It depends on the culture, the infrastructure, the legal context. 

Johnson: 

Could it be that the cycling rate is still too small in London to make a difference, we haven't reached that critical mass where the risk becomes acceptable? 

Aldred: 

What is an acceptable risk level is decided socially. Do we say that at 1%, 2% 5% cycling it gets acceptably safe? It's confounded because as you get more cycling you get more pressure for better cycling conditions, so that will feed into safety. There's a lot of things going on. 

Ben Plowden: 

I've been cycling in London for many years. You used to see hardly any other cyclists on the road, but it's very different now. I think you can get a "virtuous circle" where you get more cyclists, and improved behaviour by road users, leading to a "tipping point" where things change significantly. Now I see in some places 40 cyclists at every cycle of the lights. That must be having an effect on people's perception. 

Aldred: 

I think it is worth noting that Jacobsen's original idea of "Safety in Numbers" was in terms of presence on the roads, not in terms of a log-term cultural shift. In Grays Inn Road, when you've got 40 cyclists around you during rush-hour, it might be relatively pleasant, but late at night, when there are no other cyclists on the road and the traffic is flowing freely, it's a very different experience. You need continuity and consistency.

So, to sum up, it seems that the Director of Planning responsible for cycling in London, and perhaps the Green Assembly Member, expect cycling to automatically become safer as more people do it. On the other hand, those who have studied the subject in detail, and have real experience, know that cycling has to be made safe though the provision of infrastructure that separates cyclists physically from dangerous and intimidating motor traffic.

Personally, having studied the Netherlands, I think there is such a thing as a "critical mass" of cyclists. But it is something quite different to what all these people are thinking of. It is a phenomenon that occurs far further down the line of cycle growth than the regime they are considering. It's not at 2% modal share, or 5%, or 10%. And it's not a physical, "presence on the road" thing, it's the political phenomenon that Rachael Aldred alluded to. It's the "Dutch Effect": what happens when you have, probably, more than 51% of the entire population cycling regularly: a point that was passed in the Netherlands long ago (it is possible participation has never been below this level in the last century).

When you are in this happy situation, absolutely anything is possible for cycling. No expense is too great, no rearrangement of the urban or rural fabric too extreme to be worth doing for the comfort and convenience of cyclists, because virtually everybody wants it, there is little controversy about it, it is accepted, rather like massive state funding of health, railways, and roads for cars are accepted and non-controversial in the UK. I think that until we reach that happy state, politicians who wish for more cycling are going to have to be very pro-active and visionary. It will be vain for them to hope for a magical "tipping point" at some far lower level of cycling uptake, where it will all become easy and semi-automatic. It won't be like that. It will always be a struggle.

As a  post-script to this discussion, I quote from a recent post on the CTC blog written by Roger Geffen, the CTC's Campaigns and Policy Director. He writes about a report on cycling safety in various European countries by the European Traffic Safety Council (ETSC):

ETSC rightly recognises though that you cannot measure cycle safety simply by looking at casualty numbers. Comparisons should be based on the risk of a casualty per mile cycled (or per trip, or per hour – but at any rate, it should be relative to some measure of cycle use). Otherwise you fall into the trap of claiming that Dudley and St Helens are far safer for cycling than Cambridge(!), or, even more absurdly, that Britain is far safer than the Netherlands (as Road Safety Minister Mike Penning claimed in Parliament), simply because places with low cycle use obviously have fewer cyclist casualties. That doesn't mean they are "safer" - indeed, CTC's "Safety in numbers" evidence shows the exact opposite. 

ETSC then shows that Britain is one of only 3 EU countries to measure cycle use at the national level on an annual basis – the others being (you guessed it!) Denmark and the Netherlands. Two others, Sweden and Norway, also measure it reasonably frequently. ETSC compares cycle use and cycle safety in these five countries and, once again, finds clear evidence of the “safety in numbers” effect: cycling is safest in the places with highest cycle use. 

CTC has documented this relationship in the past, based both on a comparison of EU-wide data from a wider range of dates, and of figures from within Britain. However, until now our only source of comparable data on local cycle use within Britain was the national census, which only comes out every 10 years and covers cycle commuting only. It was good enough to show the “safety in numbers” relationship exists, but not to compare how local authorities are actually performing. 

Unsurprisingly, ETSC’s report shows that Britain is performing worst of the 5 countries in their comparison, in terms of both cycle use and cyclists’ safety. But hey, at least we are measuring this!

Here's my question: I've pointed out before how the Director of the Dutch state road safety organisation, SWOV, has said that the simple interpretation of "Safety in Numbers" – that simply having more cyclists automatically gives you safer cycling – is wrong. You have read the exchanges above. You may even have read this essay on the As Easy As Riding A Bike blog on the subject. And you may have read Freewheeler's biting satire Minutes of the Crapborough Cycling Campaign:

Also in Holland they have safety in numbers. Sam said if we could just get more people cycling in Britain then everyone would become as safe as in Holland.

Sam then showed a very interesting diagram showing how safety in numbers works in Holland. Here we see a typical Dutch street scene where a lorry driver pauses before turning. Dutch lorry drivers are used to being surrounded by lots of cyclists, which is why they take extra care at junctions.

My question is:

Is Roger Geffen of the CTC the only person in UK cycle campaigning who still believes in the simplistic nonsense of "Safety in Numbers"?

*Unfortunately the GLA website uses a Windows Media format for its videos that doesn't normally play correctly on Macs (it may be silent). The solution I have found is the free, open-source program VLC, which does play these videos correctly on the Mac.