Promoting sports cycling has absolutely nothing to do with generating a mass cycling culture

After some hints that he would say something about a "cycling legacy" from the London Olympics, Boris Johnson announced on Friday (or rather re-announced) that next year there will be a two-day festival of cycling in London to be called (rather boringly) RideLondon.

There seem to be two main elements of this. The first is a "family fun ride" on an 8-mile loop of closed roads in central London: exactly what we have had for several years annually, under the name, first, of Freewheel, and then, of the Sky Ride. This idea, was, indeed, originally suggested by the London Cycling Campaign (but not by me) to the previous mayor. The other, new, element, is a 100 mile road race for amateur and professional racing cyclists that will use a route similar to the Olympic road race.

The reaction of various cycling organisations and websites to this news has been of a certain form.

The ibikelondon blog said:

I welcome the RideLondon festival and know that it will be a phenomenal event, made so by all of the wonderful participants and crowds that turn out to cheer on our cycling heroes.

But I'm livid that a one off event is being spun by the powers that be as a "permanent legacy for cycling" in London. It is nothing of the sort, and sadly only demonstrates the utter paucity of imagination from the people whose very job it is to run our city.

The LCC said:

The London Cycling Campaign welcomes these events, but shares the disappointment of many Londoners that an announcement supposedly offering an ‘Olympic legacy’ for cyclists doesn’t include any new infrastructure to make London’s streets more safe and inviting for cycling.

The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain said:

The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain welcomes the Mayor of London's newly-announced Ride London festival. However, we note that, while closed roads for cycling, even for only two days a year, are obviously appreciated, a real legacy for cycling would be to make the roads of London safe and inviting for people of all ages and abilities, every day of the year, not just for a weekend in August.

So, all of the form, "We welcome this, but..."

Ever iconoclastic, I'm going to break the pattern. I don't welcome it. Not at all. I've been to enough of those Sky Ride type events. They are horrible. They amount to a kind of unique torture for cyclists, cramming us together like sardines in a tin on a few niggardly-handed out kilometres of closed roads in central London, for which privilege we have to suffer a bombardment of unwelcome music, moronically-cheery "motivational" announcements over PA systems, the advertising of sponsors forced down our throats, a sea of stupid yellow tabards, the promotion of helmets, and the presence of boring cyclesport celebrities. Like everything else to do with the official treatment of transport cycling in the UK, it's just another insult.

If you've seen the Netherlands now, you've seen what we could have in the UK. We could have spacious, calm, relaxed, quiet, helmetless, tabardless, traffic-free cycling for everyone, every day of the year, everywhere in the country, without damaging the economy, or banning cars. Sky Ride, or RideLondon, or whatever it is called this week, is just a grotesque travesty of this vision. I hate the whole thing, and I will not be going. If I do, it will be only to hand out Cycling Embassy publicity to try to built the campaign for transport cycling to be treated seriously by the UK.

The road race, well, there's nothing wrong with having that. I'm not interested in it, but I have no objection to it, but still, I'm not going to say "I welcome it but...", because there's no particular logic in me saying that. What I am interested in is building an everyday cycling culture in the UK similar to that which exists in the Netherlands, based on infrastructure, if that's at all possible.

In a long comment on my last blogpost from Paul M, which is worth reproducing part of here, he says of the "Olympic legacy":

But even if cycling does see a boost, and even if that boost does turn out to have legs, is that something for a “segregationist” to take much pleasure from? I doubt it – the entire thrust of Olympic cycling coverage has been about cycling as an extreme sport. Whippet-thin men with improbably muscular thighs careering along at 50kph+ on carbon bikes, got up in canary coloured lycra, helmet and wraparound shades, duelling other riders and occasionally coming to grief. All this on enclosed elliptical tracks or roads totally closed to non-official motor vehicles. There is more than a whiff of danger even without the HGVs and the boy racers to contend with. 

Segregationists, I submit, are about the very young, the fairly old, and the otherwise faint-hearted [in other words almost the entire population], who would like to use a bike in the manner of a wheeled pedestrian. There is absolutely nothing for them in this. Sure, some youngish men, and maybe indeed some youngish women, may be inspired to take up sports cycling. They will be drawn from those who are fit, confident, relatively unconscious of their own mortality, and assertive, perhaps aggressive in temperament. In other words, like the dominant cycling culture we have today, on our commuter journeys as well as out on weekend rides. To borrow from those popular postcards people pin above their desks, You don’t have to be fit, fearless, and aggressive to ride here – but it helps! 

Just as (apparently, according to the BBC last night) Darwinism can explain the athletic prowess of African-Americans through their experience of slavery and the journey across the ocean that brought them to it, the condition of our roads has evolved British commuter cyclists to have the genes which render them more likely to behave in the manner which upsets and infuriates some pedestrians and apparently all Daily Mail readers. We are caught in a vicious spiral of conditions breeding attitudes which in turn reinforce those conditions. I can see nothing in London 2012 which will change that – it will take something considerably more radical.

I agree fully. Paul puts it well. Having given considerable thought to the subject over the years, I have concluded that the promotion of cycling as sport has absolutely nothing to do with achieving the conditions needed for mass utility cycling. Absolutely nothing. Now I think the converse argument is not the same. I think that if we did have mass utility cycling, that would be good for cycle sport. One can see that from the Netherlands, where, as I wrote last year after I had been on David Hembrow's study tour:

When you have created such good conditions for cycling as the Dutch have, and cycling becomes normal transport from kindergarten to dotage, non-utility cycling also mushrooms and blossoms in every conceivable direction. Far from there being a lack of "enthusiast" or "sports" cycling in the Netherlands, the country is full of racing cyclists, time-trialists, Audaxers, long and short distance touring cyclists, leisure and enthusiast cyclists of every description, even, would you believe it, mountain bikers (there are specially constructed rough and muddy mountain biking courses, to make up for the lack of true mountains, or even hills). Every town of consequence has a racing bike track (far from the case in the UK), and you see all these breeds of leisure and sports cyclist far more frequently than you do in the UK.

I think it works this way round. The pyramid of cycling must stand on its broad base, it can't be inverted. I see no evidence that the encouragement of cycle sport, by itself, in any way influences conditions on the roads that utility cyclists (or indeed non-sporting leisure cyclists) have to cope with day in, day out. The thing I notice is that most people involved in cycling want to believe that this is not so. They are, even when they are engaged day to day in campaigning for better cycling conditions, as are, for example, so many good members of LCC and CTC, pretty much to a man, or to a woman, at least to some extent interested in the sporting side of cycling, and they want to believe there is a connection. They want to believe that if cycle racing is held in high esteem, that if half the nation follows Bradley or Chris's every move, if Team UK is winning races and if roads in Surrey are closed for the peleton to pass, that somehow this overflows into more people on bikes generally and stronger political demands for roads safe for cycling.

But in reality all the confusion and hoo-ha following Bradley Wiggins's ill-advised pronouncement on cycle safety and helmet-use just shows how difficult all this is. If we get into a world that is about speed, competition, risk, adventure, what have you, we are going further and further away from what we actually need to normalise everyday cycling in the UK. There is no way that these elite athletes, who are going to keep getting asked for their opinions on everything from helmets to cadences to energy bars to the best colour for a cycle superhighway, are ever going to be experts on safety or cycling policy. The more we in the UK focus on the image of the bike as the tool of a sport, it seems to me, the more the picture of ordinary people of all ages and fitness levels using bikes for daily short journeys goes out of focus. The more we associate cycling with speed and courage, the more reasonable seems to be the view of the "right" place for cycling as part of a flow of motor traffic, the "Effective Cycling" view of cyclists "driving" their bikes that has driven cycling into extreme marginalisation in the English-speaking world, that concurs with Boris Johnson's view that cycling on multi-lane gyratory systems designed for fast motor-vehicle throughput is no problem "if you keep your wits about you".

So I'm not going to "welcome" the organisation of a 100 mile race round the home counties by the Mayor of London, just as I'm not going to "welcome" Wimbledon, and I'm not going to "welcome" the Epson Derby or the London Marathon. I have absolutely nothing against any of these events, they are all great things to those who follow or participate in those sports, but they none of them have the slightest connection to the promotion of cycling as transport, and none of them belong in a paragraph of the form "I welcome..., but if we want to see everyday cycling...".

I was standing at a small vigil on Friday, the day Boris made his boring announcement. It was the vigil for Dan Harris, the cyclist killed by the Olympic bus at the entrance to the Olympic Park the night that Wiggins won his gold. There was a small group of cyclists there, not more than 30, and a lot of police standing round at a respectful distance from the crowd, the ghost bike, and the "shrine". The feeling I got was that we were like a tiny sect being guarded over, gently but firmly controlled, and overlooked by the security apparatus of the state. We were like the Druids who are allowed to have a ceremony at Stonehenge at midsummer, so long as they don't damage the monument, or like some other tiny minority religion, being humoured and allowed to exist by the state, though regarded essentially as a curious, slightly nutty irrelevance. That's how I think the British state regards non-sports cyclists. The reality is, behind all the warm words of encouragement, that we are held at a cold, tolerant distance. We are utterly marginal to the main thrusts of our state and society. And this is simultaneous with the whole nation loving Bradley's sideburns and Pendleton's... whatever.

What I saw in The Netherlands was the polar opposite: it was cycling embraced by state and society warmly, genuinely, unconditionally. As the mission statement of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain puts it:

We at the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain want to see an end to cyclists being pushed to the margins; we want to see a network of direct, well-designed, separated cycle routes that are safe even for young children to use.

That's it. That's how it works. RideLondon is not a step towards that in any way, and I condemn Boris Johnson absolutely for it.

The vigil for Dan Harris. More pictures here.

Why Brent's cycling strategy will fail

I suppose I've attacked the Olympics enough recently. Time to attack something else. The Biking Borough of Brent? Why not.

The Biking Borough (proportion of trips made by bike: 1.3%, proportion of school trips made by bike: 0.3%, and one of the worst places to cycle in the known universe), actually had some good publicity last week from the Brent and Kilburn Times, under the headline Brent Council awarded for taking residents for a ride:

Brent Council has been awarded a framed Team GB cycling shirt in recognition of their efforts to get residents on their bikes. 

The kit, similar to those worn by British riders in the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, has been handed to town hall bosses for providing a series of free guided rides in the borough throughout the summer. 

British Cycling, who made the award, teamed up with the council and Sky to offer ‘Sky Rides’ to beginners and cyclists who are out of the habit.

and the chirpiness continues through familiar British cycle promotion territory:

If you’ve not been on a bike for a while don’t worry, our friendly and experienced ride leaders are there to help and support you.

We want more people to get on their bikes in Brent and what better way to start than in this fantastic year for sport and cycling.

 So "cycling" in this Olympic year becomes more than ever identified with a sports activity.

One thing that is wrong with this is, of course, that, even in Olympic London, there are, horror of horrors, many people, probably, at a guess, about half the population, who are not interested in sport at all. They are just putting up with all this Olympic nonsense, staying quietly in their houses, or they have gone to Scotland or somewhere. They will be back. An appeal to them to cycle, on the basis of its sportiness and fitness-giving qualities, will not work. These are the people who are least likely to cycle in the present sports-promotional climate, but who would perhaps benefit most from cycling.

For others, a few, such appeals might work, for a while: for a month or two, or a few years. Enough for them to replace for a while the generation of cyclists who started in the almost car-free 1950s, and who are now dying or becoming incapable of cycling. Enough for them to replace the middle-aged cyclists who finally throw in the towel and decide it is all too stressful. So we have what is known as "churn". The overall number of people cycling regularly doesn't change very much. The increase that we have seen in cycling in London in recent years in terms of miles cycled is largely accounted for by regular cyclists cycling more. And that increase has been much smaller than is often claimed: it's been about 50% in the last two decades (DfT data quoted on p31 of BMA Healthy transport study), not, as people keep claiming, a "doubling" or "tripling"of cycling in London. Other surveys show us that amongst some significant communities in London, 90% say they never cycle.

The Olympics, and in particular, Team GB's success on the cycle track and in the road races, inspires a lot of people to a counter-experiential faith in how normal, everyday cycling on our roads might change as a result afterwards. For myself, I don't see much of a connection between the condition of the sport and conditions on the roads and paths for utility cycling. The success of Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France never did anything for utility cycling in the USA, so far as I can see. The same goes for all the French cycle racers who ever did well; utility cycling is at almost as absymal a level in France as it is in the UK. The driving out of traffic of central London by the Olympics has has a good effect on cycling, but I am sure it will be temporary. We will be back to normal soon. Conditions will be back to where they were, unless they are deliberately changed through decisions by politicians, and cycling levels, which are a consequence of those conditions, as well as of "push" factors, such as the cost of public transport, will return to what they were.

One thing that I am so totally certain of, I would bet everything I have on it, is that we will never see "mass cycling" in London, or other major UK cities, unless the streets start to look completely different to how they do now. This is how a main road in Brent (the A5, Edgware Road, at Colindale) looks now:

And this is how a typical suburban main through-road in the Netherlands looks:

It's the difference between cycling hell and cycling heaven.

This is how a typical wide residential road of mid-20th century design in North Brent (Mollison Way) looks now:

And this is how a typical Dutch mid-20th century residential road of similar width looks:

Again, cycling hell versus cycling heaven.

This is how a typical narrow residential road of 19th century design in South Brent (Chapter Road, on the London Cycle Network, no less) looks now:

And this is how a typical Dutch 19th century residential road of similar width looks now:

Again, it's making the cycling environment delightful as against making it nasty and stressful. I bet my bottom dollar that will never get cycling in Brent, and similar urban areas in the UK, beyond the two or three percent modal share unless these street scenes that you see here are transformed in the direction that the Dutch show us. And only decisions taken by politicians can achieve that, not anything any athlete can do, not anything any business can do, not anything any social movement or trend can do, on its own.

A street scene that further illustrates this point I take directly from the Department for Transport's own website. I grabbed this one from their "roads" page, so presumably it's something that they think is good, and representitive of UK's roads:

I'm not sure where this is – it could be London somewhere. There's a bike shop, a branch of Evans, on this street. There's a widened pavement with benches (that nobody is using), and there is fancy new paving, and there are new street trees, and there is heavy traffic, and there is no space for cycling. This is a type of picture you cannot take in the Netherlands. Streets there simply do not look like this any more. After at least 40 years of planning to make it so, Dutch roads now are either "roads for movement" (as in my picture of the "suburban main road" with the cycle track, above), or "streets", meaning, roads that are focussed around activities: commerce, learning, living. Such streets never now function to transmit large volumes of motor traffic. The combined commercial-living-walking-parking-cycling-bus-heavy-motor-through-route idea of a road, exemplified in the photo of Edgware Road, and the DfT's own photo, is gone in the Netherlands. And that's why its much better both to cycle and to drive in the Netherlands.

So I'm certain that the physical characteristics of our streets have to change if we are ever to see a true cycling revolution in the UK. It's a planning matter. And who does planning in the UK? Largely, it's the councils, like the London Borough of Brent.

I was therefore interested to see that Brent's "Highways Committee" (which looks after both its roads and streets – how antiquated the name they use for themselves seems in the context of this discussion) has recently discussed cycling. On 17 July they had an agenda item entitled Recent success and future direction of cycling in Brent. It's on the web.

This document starts:

1.1 Brent Council is a robust supporter of cycling as a healthy, cheap and environmentally sustainable form of transport. The sustainable transport team, based in the Council’s Highway & Transport Delivery Service, facilitates and manages the delivery of a broad range of measures which make it safer, easier and more attractive to cycle in the Borough.

1.2 Brent’s statutory transport plan – the Mayoral/Council approved “Local Implementation Plan” (LIP) 2011-2014 includes ambitious targets of almost doubling the number of trips made by bicycle over the next eight years.

1.3 This Report presents what the Council has recently achieved in relation to cycling, what it is doing now, and what it proposes to do in the future. It also presents the steps Brent is taking to support the London-wide and local targets and provides information as to recent successes in reducing the level of cycling-related casualties on the borough's highways network.

And goes on to give "four overarching principles", as follows:

- INFRASTRUCTURE: To continue to maintain - and where funding allows – develop the existing cycling infrastructure, making it more attractive to both existing and potential cyclists, for example, delivering hundreds of additional cycle parking spaces across the borough over the next few years;

- ENVIRONMENT: To promote cycling as a responsible choice, being a carbon-zero - environmentally friendly form of transport which also helps reduce road traffic congestion and reduce localised air pollution in Brent;

- HEALTH: To work alongside colleagues in sports and health departments, including the Brent NHS, to promote cycling as a “lifestyle choice” which can greatly improve personal health and help combat obesity;

- SAFETY: To ensure that cycle training and supporting cycling safety programmes such as “Bike It” are promoted and continue to be offered – for free – to anyone who lives, works or studies in Brent, so both new and experienced cyclists can cycle with more confidence.

Read those four paragraphs, and see if you agree with me that they should be correctly titled:

- INFRASTRUCTURE
- PROMOTION
- PROMOTION
and
- TRAINING

And the infrastructure strand doesn't sound very hopeful, if the prime example they can think of is parking. Parking is not infrastructure. Infrastructure is what you get around on. So it looks like the strategy to increase cycling from 1.3% mode share to 2.5% by 2020 (para 3.4) is at least 75% promotion and training. It doesn't sound hopeful. Well, maybe that 25% infrastructure will be very good, good enough to make a difference.

The key paragraph in the report I think is para. 3.32:

3.32 Creating safer streets remains the borough's utmost priority. However, we remain conscious that outer-London is a very different place to inner-London. This is no traffic-free "South Bank". Brent has a population of over 260,000 people and some very busy - and hugely congested - roads spanning the borough. For example, the A5 and the A404 are part of the Transport for London Strategic Road Network, and very busy bus routes.

This paragraph demonstrates, I think, that Brent's planners have given up on the idea of safe cycle infrastructure before they have started. Brent is "not inner London". Well, well, well, who would have thought it. Sorry, shouldn't that make it easier to create quality cycling infrastructure, not more difficult??

There is a lot more space available in outer than in inner London. The population density is lower. I have shown in my photos above how there is clearly enough space on the streets of Brent to create a "heaven" for cycling, if those streets were re-designed along Dutch lines. I don't know if they know what they are talking about, with their "traffic-free South Bank". Most of the South Bank is not a practical cycle route, cycling is banned there in critical places, and in other places it tends to be too crowded with pedestrians. There is a major problem with much of the land on the South Bank being private (e.g. outside County Hall), meaning that a continuous, legally-enforceable route cannot be created. The South Bank is in no way a good or relevant comparison for Brent. More relevant might be the Royal Parks of central London, where, at least in places, popular and decent cycle routes have been provided which do kind of link to the roads (well, in only one really, Hyde Park), while cycling on all paths in Brent parks remains banned by a bye-law dating from 1906.

What para. 3.32 seems to be saying is that Brent Council cannot see how cyclists can be given their own space on its "busy – and hugely congested  roads". With that attitude, their cycling strategy is certain to fail. It took political courage and determination for the Dutch (and the Danes) to change their roads from looking something very like Brent's do now, in the 1970s, to how they appear today. It wasn't very popular at first, 'till people saw the strategy working. That courage and determination, that vision, is completely absent in the UK's town halls. There are stirrings of it in France (a country I have already criticised in this post), where Paris's mayor wants to remove the motorways along both banks of the Seine that have blighted the city since the 1960s, and give those banks over to walkers and cyclists. We could have that on the north bank of the Thames in London, where the land is public (or on the south bank if we had a political system that could take on big commercial interests and compulsorily purchase critical plots of urban land for public environmental benefit), but that seems a million miles from Boris Johnson's agenda.

In their trawl of facts to justify the claim, in its title, of Recent success... of cycling in Brent, the report's authors turn up the fact that over the last two decades-ish, Brent has reduced its cycling KSIs (Killed or Seriously Injured) more than any other London borough. This is put forward as an indication of the success of Brent's road safety policies (or road danger reduction policies, as the authors carefully choose to put it). Here is their graph:

Now this is just a comparison of absolute KSI numbers, independent of cycling rate. So it could mean that Brent has had greater success than any other borough at making the cycling environment safer, or it could mean that cyclists have been completely frightened off the roads of Brent, or, at least, off the dangerous ones. One thing is worth noticing – a consistent pattern in the data: the boroughs that seem to have done well in casualty reduction terms are all the outer London boroughs with extremely low cycling rates: Brent, Enfield, Havering, Redbridge, Hillingdon, Bexley, Harrow, Sutton, etc. Here you can make this comparison with the data for cycling in each borough, from TfL's Travel in London Report 1 (2009) (the most recent such comparative data I can find):

Though there are exceptions, generally, boroughs that have seen the KSI increases are the high-cycling inner ones. It looks to me like there have been, over the period, bigger increases in cycling in the areas that were already relatively high-cycling areas, and hence more casualties, despite, probably, some increase in safety per mile cycled everywhere. In outer London, including Brent, the increases in cycling were so small, or negative, that they could not outweigh the modest safety improvement. It looks like Brent came out top of this KSI analysis because the growth in cycling here was lower than anywhere else in London because of the terrible conditions. So there is really nothing for Brent to claim as success here. The overwhelmingly important fact remains that Brent's citizens are virtually all too scared to cycle on Brent's roads.

And when you consider the fact that you simply cannot cross the central part of the borough from south to north, cycling all the way, and not dismounting, without either doing something illegal, or cycling through this (the intersection of the A4088 and A406 (North Circular Road) in Neasden):

Is it any wonder?

I see in Brent Council's complacent, mis-focused, absurdly optimistic document no recognition of the real, all too brutally physical, nature of the problem, no realisation of the scale of the task, no real strategy for making the changes that would be needed to fulfil even their modest "cycle doubling in eight years" objective, most of all, no recognition of why, in truth, 98.7% of journeys in Brent are NOT made by bike now.

It says in para 4.0, Financial Implications,

There are no significant financial implications arising from this report.

and refers back to para 3.3, where it says:

3.13 Brent Council does not provide funding for promoting and facilitating increased levels of cycling in the borough, unlike highways aspects such as road maintenance. Officers spending time on cycling-related projects “recharge” their time to Transport for London funded projects, meaning even their salaries are essentially ‘subsidised’ for the time they spend on cycling issues and related initiatives. Cycling projects – particularly infrastructure specific projects, are also regularly funded by “Section 106” (local developer) contributions.

Well, this is the bombshell, isn't it? Or at least it would be, to someone unacquainted with the ways of UK local government and sustainable transport. It means there's actually no money to actually change anything for cycling on the streets. There are bids to TfL (in the Local Implementation Plan) for the odd £100,000 here and there, but these are always schemes with multiple purpose, such as bus priority, or "streetscape improvements", "Corridor Bids" as they are called in the current jargon, with bit of cycling, perhaps a logo or two, a sign, some parking, or even a dropped kerb, tacked on. There is no budget for the kinds of changes that are really needed from any source, public or private. If the report was honest and ernest in its objectives, there certainly would be "financial implications arising from" it. Vast ones. To get cyclists safely and conveniently through that road system shown in my last picture would require infrastructure changes costing, almost certainly, several millions of pounds. And this is just one junction out of many junctions and roads that would need massively overhauling to make Brent truly a Biking Borough.

The project just isn't serious, and anybody reading this Highways committee report, and then looking at the realities on the ground, that I have shown in a few representative pictures, and comparing them with the quality of infrastructure that has been shown to be necessary to achieve a mass cycling culture in other European countries, is able to see that. I'm sorry to be a pessimistic messenger again, and a none too diplomatic one, as I know the report must have been written by people with whom I have contact, and some of whom I know are good people who believe in the potential of cycling and try hard to put a case for it, within the resources available to them, but I think someone has to tell it like it is. Brent's cycling strategy, on its present conceptual and funding basis, will certainly fail.

A last word (or two) on money. We seem to have got it into our collective heads in the UK that cycling infrastructure is "expensive", and promotion is "affordable". Hence the focus on promotion. But I argue all the money spent on promotion, without parallel infrastructure change, is money down the drain. It just sustains the cycling "churn". Quality infrastructure is expensive compared to PR initiatives, in the short term, "Nice things cost money" as Jim Davis puts it, but on a long long term analysis it would look different. David Hembrow tells us, from the Dutch perspective, that even the best cycling infrastructure in the world is not really expensive on the scale of other government expenditures. A level of expenditure of 30 euros per person per year, the Dutch level, about £20, equates to around one billion pounds for the UK. The UK's transport budget is £22 billion. For Brent's population, that level of expenditure would be £5.2 million per year.

A new building is currently rising in Wembley. This is Brent's new Civic Centre, to replace the Town Hall and other council offices, scheduled for completion towards the end of this year. Brent is making a lot of the environmental credentials of this building – it will be the greenest in the UK, they claim. I have also heard Brent officers, ever optimistic, expressing hopes that lots of people working at, and visiting, the building will cycle there. I expect they will provide lots of cycle parking, consistent with their infrastructure strategy.

I predict that will not work. It cannot, without a major transformative plan for cycle and walking connections for the whole area around Wembley, of which there is no sign (the 2007 Sustrans GOAL plan having gone nowhere). I expect the cycle parking to be little used. For Wembley is situated at an almost uniquely inaccessible choke point on London's road network, closely surrounded by railway lines whose only cycleable crossing points are a few very major, crowded, polluted, nasty roads, full of HGVs: Bridge Road, Forty Avenue, East Lane, Wembley Hill Road, Great Central Way, Park Lane, and Wembley High Road. If this were not enough, the whole area is cut off from the south of the borough, where most of the population lives, by the North Circular Road, only crossable at Neasden (at the junction pictured above) or the slightly safer, but still deeply unpleasant, Harrow Road intersection.

The Civic Centre will cost £100 million on current estimates. Brent is borrowing this money, to be repaid (with normal interest of course) by Council Tax payers over the coming years. It seems they can choose to borrow this sum of money to create a new working environment for the council, but not to create a cycle network. £100 million equates to nearly 20 years of expenditure on cycle infrastructure at the Dutch rate, long enough to totally transform the cycling (and walking) environment of this part of London, getting a large slice of the population choosing active and healthy travel options, and massively reducing motor vehicle use, with all the congestion, pollution and business benefits that would bring (for Brent currently has the worst air quality in London).

The Civic Centre shows Brent Council can choose to spend serious money. Is it choosing the right things to spend on? I know what I would prefer them to do.

Sunset view taken from the current Brent Town Hall, looking across Forty Lane towards Wembley Stadium, with the new Civic Centre under construction just to the right of it

Picking cherries and other low-hanging fruit

There are plenty of videos on the internet showing large numbers of people cycling in high-cycling towns and cities. Here's a nice example from Copenhagenize, showing morning traffic on Nørrebrogade – allegedly the busiest cycle street in the world.



There always seem to be people of a certain persuasion, writing on the internet in English, who react to these videos with the cry of cherrypicking. You are creating a distorted impression of the scale or nature of cycling in these places, they claim, picking deliberately unrepresentative locations or times at which to make these videos.

Of course anybody making any kind of political point cherry-picks what they present. When the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain decided to go on a study tour this year, we cherry-picked the nation of the Netherlands to visit. We did not pick Russia, or Berkshire, or Los Angeles. And there was a reason for this. And, strangely enough, a staff team from the London Cycling Campaign soon after cherry-picked the Netherlands to go to, to study cycling policy as well. Coincidentally – nothing to do with me. Surprising?

The point about cherrypicking surely is this: one can only do it where there are cherries to be picked. The sort of cherry seen in the Copenhagen video can only be picked in a couple of countries in the western world. There is nowhere else this could have been filmed, that's the point. There is something special going on here, that those other countries, where this could not have been filmed, need to understand.

One needs to look for what is common to those countries, regions and cities, where this sort of scene can be witnessed at all. I've stressed this before, but it seems to be one of those things that needs saying again and again. So here is the graph again, a few years old, it has to be admitted, courtesy of CTC, "The UK's National Cyclists' Organisation".

From CTC's Safety in Numbers

It's a pity I can't find a more up-to-date presentation, and one that includes Germany and Switzerland, which have both developed their cycling cultures in the last few years. But here we see how the Netherlands and Denmark stand out "by a mile" (or 1.61 km) as Europe's leading cycling nations, despite being not all that culturally similar. We see how the other Nordic countries, plus Austria and Italy, cluster far behind, but still significantly ahead of the others.

And we note that what these high to moderate-level cycling nations all have in common, across major cultural differences, and differences of climate and physical and human geography, is the provision of networks for cyclists separate from motor traffic. Cycle paths and cycle tracks, as you see in the video. And we see there is a perfect correlation. The Netherlands and Denmark have far more cycle-specific infrastructure than the other countries, and they have far higher cycling rates, and genuinely safer cycling. The cluster of nations further to the left all have a significant amount of quality cycle infrastructure, but far less than the Netherlands and Denmark. The nations on the left of the graph have hardly any proper cycle infrastructure (though the city of Paris at least seems to be making some progress on this).

The CTC wanted to demonstrate in this graph a relationship between cycling safety and numbers of cyclists, which clearly does exist, but they have largely ignored the most important lesson of this data, which leaps out from it: that you get safety and high cycling numbers simultaneously from high quality dedicated cycle infrastructure. Their document from which this graph is taken has nothing to say about infrastructure!

I can't cherry-pick a scene in London to video, comparable to the bicycle rush-hour on Nørrebrogade . The closest I can get is this scene in Bloomsbury, which I have shown before. And, funnily enough, the infrastructure in this picture, exceptionally for the UK, looks a little bit like Dutch or Danish cycle infrastructure.



But, such rare exceptions notwithstanding, the UK, by and large, continues on a strange cycling path of its own, a path of trying to "promote" cycling rather than actually accommodating it. Here's some "low-hanging fruit", that I snapped in my garden in June:

Low-hanging fruit in Brent

What's this got to do with anything? Well, here's another picture from this summer. It shows a slightly sad stall that Gerhard Weiss of London Cycling Campaign was manning for Transport for London at the Gladstonbury Festival in Gladstone Park, Brent.

"Catch up with the bicycle", Gladstone Park, Brent, London

The family-friendly bikes and bike attachments on display here are things not often seen on the streets of Brent. I didn't see them getting much serious interest from locals either. When I asked Gerhard what the purpose of this was, he replied that TfL were paying LCC to take this stall round various community festivals in London, particularly in the outer London Biking Boroughs. TfL's purpose here was to target families with children in these suburbs as "low-hanging fruit", as they chose to put it: people who needed just a little nudge, perhaps as little as being shown the existence of the right type of family-friendly gear, to get them cycling.

Well, with no criticism intended to Gerhard or the other staff of LCC, but plenty of criticism intended for TfL, I have to say I think this is utter bunkum. When bureaucrats come up with crappy phrases like "low-hanging fruit", you know you are in fantasy-land. They should have taken cognisance of what Griet Scheldemen of Lancaster University said, commenting on the  Understanding Walking and Cycling study of which she was a part:

Regrettably, we did not find this mass of people on the threshold of change, who only needed a little push to start cycling as a daily means of getting around...

For the truth is there is no way that many families are ever going to cycle the main roads of Brent with their kiddies in these cycle trailers or child seats, without an infrastructure revolution in London of which there is absolutely no sign. There is no way these families using these contraptions will "take the lane" through the deadly concrete tunnel in Neasden under the North Circular Road, or ride on the equally terrifying motorway-style flyover across the North Circular at Staples Corner: the junctions on that road that lie immediately to the north and west of this park. And, if they want to go the the areas of Brent to the north and west of this park, if they live in Neasden, Wembley or Colindale, these two roads are where they are going to have to cycle. Because there are no other crossings of the North Circular Road for miles in either direction that you could get these bike trailers through.

Staples Corner

Because the only other crossings of the North Circular near here are a footbridge that you are not allowed to cycle over, between Kenwyn Avenue and Neasden Recretion Ground, and a preposterous "shared" pedestrian/cycle tunnel at Neasden Lane. Here is the first of these:

The approach to the footbridge across the North Circular Road at Kenwyn Avenue

It wouldn't be legal, but just try cycling your bike trailer loaded with its precious cargo round the tight square bends on the ramp up to that footbridge. Just try to get your bike and trailer there in the first place, round those (perfectly legally) parked cars which thoroughly block access to the ramp from the road. And if you do manage to get across, and you land up on Neasden Recreation Ground on the north side, try getting anywhere else from there without cycling on pavements. You will find you get sucked into the Neasden northern roundabout, a nasty place, of which more later.

Here's the second off-road option I mentioned, the horrible Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass. Try getting your Bakfiets or Christiana round those barriers and corners. The lady with the pushchair is having enough trouble.

The pedestrian/cycle underpass of the North Circular Road at Neasden Lane

If you just have a normal bike, which you can squeeze past these barriers, and you try to access this underpass from the south, from Neasden shopping centre, you find you have to cycle the wrong way along a stretch of slip road coming off the North Circular, as in this picture. The entrance you are aiming for is marked by the archway in front of the white house.

One-way slip road at Neasden shopping centre that makes it impossible to legally cycle to the official bike underpass of the North Circular

If you take this route, by illegally cycling on the pavement, or wheeling your bike, or ignoring the no entry sign and hopping a kerb, and negotiate the barriers, curly ramp and steep slopes, you end up in this delightful tunnel. The pink slippery tiling is the part specially reserved for cyclists (the part you see all the pedestrians on). I met a woman who had broken her shoulder through a fall from a bike in this tunnel, as the paving is treacherous when wet.

The shared pedestrian/cycle tunnel under the North Circular at Neasden

Supposing it is not too wet and you make it through here without injury or collision with pedestrians, what do you get when you emerge from this tunnel on the north side of the North Circular  Road? You get this:

The Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass exit into Neasden Lane North

You can't rejoin the road here because (1) there is no dropped kerb, (2) there is no way to cross this busy section of Neasden Lane North, which feeds southbound traffic from Neasden Lane North on to the North Circular eastbound and eastbound traffic from the North Circular off it in various directions, and, (3) if you did cross the road and tried to go north you would immediately be fed on to the northern Neasden roundabout, a terrifying, fast, multi-lane gyratory, seen here in a view from the north, with Neasden Lane North and the underpass exit in the distance. 

Neaden northern roundabout

There is a theoretical alternative to all this, indicated with short green and purple lines on the TfL London Cycle Guide No. 3, which is to take another leg of the the underpass diagonally under the Neasden Lane North–North Circular junction, and then a footbridge to a small road called Vicarage Way, which at least gets you on the correct side of the Neasden northern roundabout, though you still end up very close to fast heavy traffic, to its left. But (wait for it) there are a couple of problems with this: (1) you are not allowed to cycle into and out of this exit from the underpass, as shown by the sign in the view below, and, (2) you are not allowed to cycle on the footbridge leading to Vicarage Way.

Exit from Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass on the west side of Neasden Lane North

In any case, with your tagalong child bike, or Christiana, or Bakfiets, that you have bought, inspired by the TfL Catch up with the Bicycle display, I'll wager you won't be able to negociate any of this pathetic "infrastructure". You'll HAVE to use this road, that we are looking down on to here. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

The Neasden North Circular Road underpass , looking north-west

This is the view looking from the non-cycling footbridge into what Brent cyclists call "Death Valley": the vehicle route, the A4088, under the North Circular at Neasden for all traffic heading north-west from the Willesden area. The picture was taken with a good camera in good daylight, but look at the motion blur on those vehicles. Do you fancy keeping to the right of the traffic turning left on to the slip road with all your family in tow? And, by the way, there is another slip road that merges from the left, coming off the North Circular, at the other end of Death Valley. And, if you are going this way, cycling north or west from Gladstone Park, Neasden Station or Willesden, this is not the first barrier you will have encountered, for to get to Death Valley, you first have to negotiate the southern Neasden roundabout, seen in the background in this view, looking the other way from the same footbridge.

Neasden's "Death Valley" looking towards the southern Neasden roundabout

If you make it through the southern roundabout, and Death Valley, with its slip roads, in one piece, you are then led onto the next section of Neasden Lane North, where you are crammed into two narrow lanes of heavy traffic:

Neasden Lane North junction with Verney Street

To continue north-west to Wembley or Kingsbury you carry on over the River Brent, where this road becomes Blackbird Hill. This is another route to which, in Brent, the borough of infrastructural Thatcherism, there is no alternative. For this is where the tiny stream of the Brent (plus the Grand Union Feeder Canal) is first bridged downstream of the Brent reservoir, and this bridge, Kingsbury Bridge, which has stood here since Saxon times, and was last widened for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (for which the old Wembley Stadium was built), still carries all the traffic between the north and south parts of the borough: another great environment to cycle in with your kids on their tagalong bike.

Blackbird hill, the meeting-point of Neasden, Wembley and Kingsbury

And beyond that... well, "the world's your oyster". As you would expect from Brent, there are a few nasty junctions and viscious mini-roundabouts at the top of this hill where routes fork between Wembley to the west and Kingsbury to the north, but I think that is enough of this safari, you'll have got the idea by now. And that ideas is: 

It is not the slightest bit surprising that families cycling with children are seen round here less frequently than UFOs.

Much less frequently, in fact. If anybody wanted further explanation of why, as mentioned in my last post, the wards of Brent to the north of the North Circular have true cycling mode shares probably below 0.5%, here it is. When TfL come up with this crap about just needing to put a bike trailer under the noses of their "low hanging fruit" of Brent parents who are just dying to cycle their kids on these monstrous roads, or trying to negotiate these impossible, crappy, tenth-rate cycle "facilities", I have to despair.

What the Dutch and the Danes teach us is that, with cycle facilities, you have to engineer for everybody to make it work for anybody. You have to build your cycle infrastructure to a quality that works safely and efficiently, simultaneously, for 8 year-old children on their own and fit young adult commuters and for everybody inbetween, including every kind of bike and bike trailer. If you under-engineer, or try to cheaply adapt already inadequate pedestrian facilities with just a bit of lining or surfacing, or try to get away with something that some idiot in the council thinks might be "OK for slow cyclists or novices or those afraid of the traffic", you just get unusable rubbish. If TfL can't get together the money and political resolution to implement sensible, safe cycling infrastructure, they should stop trying to promote cycling at all with these ridiculous tents at community festivals. For doing so is simply a waste of money.

The Dutch do not seem to waste their money in this way. They actually build things. They are strange, like that. The nation of dyke and dam and sluice builders and drainers of polders actually build stuff all the time. While the infrastructure of Brent, and most of outer London, seems frozen in a time-warp as it was left by the road and flyover builders about 1972, with seemingly all further change impossible, or impossible to afford for the UK, the eighth richest nation in the work, apart from putting in the odd stainless steel anti-cycling barrier, or putting down of two colours of slippery paving in a narrow, wet, horrible pedestrian subway, the Dutch constantly build high-standard bridges, tunnels and underpasses everywhere, from one end of their country to the other, to separate cyclists from motor vehicles and pedestrians and let cyclists travel in safety, speed, and style, to all the places they could want to go. If the North Circular Road were in the Netherlands, cyclists would go under it like this:

Dual carriageway and two-way cycle track go under a motorway in Assen, Netherlands

Or they would be taken over it like this:

Cycle bridge over a motorway in Groningen, Netherlands

But, to end with, I'll indulge in a little fantasy. Maybe we could soon get a decent crossing for cyclists of the North Circular Road in Brent: something the Dutch would recognise as cycle infrastructure. Because the North Circular Road–A5 junction at Staples Corner is due to be rebuilt – and not with public money. The developers of Brent Cross Cricklewood have to pay for a total rebuild of this junction, as part of their new out of town shopping centre regeneration scheme. The main company behind the Brent Cross Cricklewood scheme is Hammerson PLC. Hammerson's Development Director during the planning of this scheme was Michael Bear, who now has been elected Lord Mayor of London. (That's the largely ceremonial Mayor of the financial "square mile" of the City, not the post held by Boris Johnson, for my foreign readers.) And he seems to have got quite keen on cycling.

So are Hammerson going to give the cyclists of north-west London something like this? I'm afraid I'm not holding my breath.

Skyride and a launch: the past and the future of London cycling?

This past weekend saw something old and something new for cyclists in the capital. First the new: the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain had its formal launch on Saturday. In pleasant sunshine, on what may prove to be the last summery day of the year, a group of about 40 people with bikes gathered on the south side of Lambeth Bridge to hear a speech by Jim Davis, Chairman of the Embassy, to meet the Head of Public Diplomacy, Press and Culture from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in London, and to take photographs. A fairly low-key event, it was an opportunity to put some faces to people known only by name or blogging handle, discuss differences of emphasis or perception amongst different campaigners, all of whom agreed that the main solution for cycling has to be better infrastructure, and consider how to take the campaign forward. Here is Jim Davis's speech:

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Welcome to this launch and picnic for the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain.

We find ourselves in a strange land, where grown men feel that they not only have to put on helmets and body armour but put cameras on it too. Great as a resource, great if you’re Quentin Tarantino but useless if you’re a 10 year old wanting to go to school.

Where something that our grandparents did without question has become so marginalised. So specialised.

Where Councils provide facilities without any real knowledge of what they’re providing for. The end result looks like it was designed by a combination of an Etch-a-Sketch and a litre of vodka.

It doesn’t have to be like this. If we don’t get it right then we shall see more Superhighways that double as car parks at the weekend, more converted pavements bringing cyclists into direct conflict with pedestrians, the elderly and disability groups.

We are proud to have as a guest a representative from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands [Mr Jan van Weijen – Head of Public Diplomacy, Press and Culture]. The Netherlands is a country that made a change for the better nearly 40 years ago and has also been a particular inspiration to the Cycling Embassy. They’ve made mistakes, they’ve learnt from their mistakes and now 27% of all journeys are made by bicycle. In Britain, it is 2%. Their children can start cycling to school from the age of 8 and in a UNICEF study in 2007 they topped the table for child wellbeing. Britain came 21st. the USA came 20th. Could try harder.

We launch our policies today and they will develop in time with further consultation with other organisations and of course, you.

Have a look at our policies, our Manifesto & Mission Statement. Have a chat with me today. If you share our beliefs then please donate if you can, chat on our forum, even buy the T-Shirt in the new Embassy shop just launched. We shall be posting a Situations Vacant page very shortly to give greater clarity to those that want to help in terms of ideas of expertise.

We want to make riding a bike as easy as riding a bike and we know you do too.

Thank you

Jim makes his speech (photo by Mark Ames)

Some of the people at the launch (photo by Mark Ames)

After that it was off for perhaps the shortest organised bike ride ever, across Lambeth Bridge to Victoria Tower Gardens for a picnic. When we planned this we thought that Lambeth Bridge had the worst cycle lanes in London, but, bizarrely, as if Transport for London had got wind that the bridge was to be exposed to the bright light of publicity across the whole world of cycling, it was resurfaced on Thursday night and the lines were repainted on Friday. The southbound cycle lane is now gone and the northbound no longer quite the worst cycle lane in London. But the bridge remains sandwiched between two profoundly cycle-unfriendly roundabouts, the cycle lane ending before it gets to either of them – pointing up the uselessness of providing cycle facilities in a spot manner ("pepperpotting" as it is also known) rather than as parts of properly worked-out continuous routes. And on the roundabouts (particularly the southern), we did indeed encounter drivers seemingly determined to put an early end to the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain. Fortunately they failed.

First Embassy picnic

And so on to the picnic, which was followed by a ride led by Mark Ames (ibikelondon) along the permitted cycle routes through the Royal Parks as far as the Albert Memorial, where, after more photos, the group dispersed. Some people had come from as far afield as Scotland, Newcastle, and Bristol, emphasising that this is a national campaign, not a London one, and some of them stayed on in London for the Mayor of London's Sky Ride the next day, to distribute Embassy postcards to the throngs of people on bikes at this event.

The Embassy at the Albert Memorial

The weather went rapidly downhill on Sunday, and heavy rain dampened enthusiasm for the Sky Ride, participation in which was down to about 50,000 from 80,000 last year. The Mayor of London's Sky Ride is a concept that was originally suggested by the London Cycling Campaign. It was known as the "London Freewheel" before Boris Johnson sold it off to Sky Sports, who, with British Cycling, put a sporty cycling gloss on it and divorced it further from anything to do with cycling for transport.

In this event, a seven mile circuit of central London streets is given over exclusively to bikes for a few hours once a year, cyclists are dressed up like yellow canaries for no apparent reason except to unwillingly advertise Sky Sports, and a huge number of obstructive barriers is erected around The Mall to prevent anybody from conveniently walking anywhere, enforced by a huge number of paid-for-the-day officious event staff who shout orders at you and tell you what a good time you are having. LCC organises a large number of feeder rides from the suburbs to the Sky Ride, for which it gets paid by TfL, and these tend to attract a lot of new or occasional cyclists, attracted by the prospect of cycling on traffic-free roads. However, a critical point, which shows the lack of real commitment to the concept from the authorities: the routes from the suburbs to the start of the course are not closed to motor traffic. Volunteers are expected to marshal groups of hundreds of beginner cyclists, including small children, through heavy and aggressive London traffic, for distances of 10 miles or more to the start of the traffic-free circuit. In recent years Sky has developed the concept and there have been smaller Sky Rides in other parts of London and elsewhere in the UK.

To my mind, while the Cycling Embassy is the start of a potential new dawn for transport cycling in the UK, the Sky Rides are a symbol of the failed past of UK cycle promotion. Boris Johnson thinks the Sky Rides are "a key part" of his "cycling revolution", but this is tosh. The is no evidence that the Sky Rides make any contribution to a modal shift to cycling in London. If they did, we should see, in the weeks after Sky Ride, a new tranche of cyclists on the streets in their free Sky high-vis tabards. We don't. In my experience, those who come on the Skyrides are either regular cyclists already, or they are those who drive down, take the train up, or take part in the marshalled feeder rides, for their once-a-year experience of cycling in London, to put the bike away afterwards for another year, apart from possible leisure rides in the countryside or abroad. To expect Sky Ride to encourage more people to cycle under everyday London traffic conditions is like expecting the experience of taking a cross-channel ferry to encourage people to swim the channel. It unrealistic, as the conditions are so profoundly different.

The lesson taught by the tens of thousands of people who turn up to the Sky Rides is clear, as others have pointed out before me, but it is one our politicians stubbornly refuse to learn. As the Cycling Embassy keeps saying, there is a massive suppressed demand from people who want to cycle, but will not do so on our streets as they are now. They will cycle if you take the traffic away. I cannot put it better than the text on the back of the Cycling Embassy postcards:

Why can't we see traffic-free cycling every day?

Isn't it nice when there is space for everyone to ride their bikes? Families love events like Sky Rides, but when asked why they don't cycle every day, the answer is clear: it just feels too dangerous.  We can't get rid of cars, but we can start to work towards providing safe, separated cycle tracks designed to be used by all, even the youngest children, away from motor traffic.  Evidence from the Netherlands - the bicycle capital of the world - show that if you provide safe space for cyclists everyone - men, women, old, young, rich, poor - will feel happy choosing to ride their bikes.

We at the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain want to see an end to cyclists being pushed to the margins; we want to see a network of direct, well-designed, separated cycle routes that are safe even for young children to use, so that every ride can be a Sky Ride. 

Sky Ride itself is a waste of time and money. The principle may have been thought up by a cycling organisation, but it is is a failure. It is a sop so that Boris Johnson and other politicians, and business sponsors, can claim they are "promoting cycling", while doing nothing to make everyday cycling safer or more attractive. The Sky Rides re-enforce the leisure ands sports image of cycling in the UK and further divorce it from anything to do with ordinary transport. They promote an image of cycling as an activity to be done wearing helmets and bizarre ugly clothing that no-one wants to wear. They take away volunteer and activist time and energy of dedicated cyclists that could otherwise be spent on lobbying for better conditions. By involving voluntary organisations like the LCC they lock them into a contracted-out government service role that is irrelevant to their true purpose, and again, simply a distraction. They promote corporate entertainment and sports interests that are antithetical to the true healthy spirit of independence and individuality of "just riding a bike". For these reasons the Sky Rides positively work against cycling.

The Sky Rides are a symbol of a non-cycling nation and the Mayor of London's Sky Ride is a symbol and symptom of a non-cycling city. Rather than a one-a-year experience of traffic-free cycling in central London, what all those people who take part really need is traffic-free cycling in their local neighbourhoods 365 days a year. If we had a real cycling city, we would not need Sky Rides, nor feeder rides, nor websites, nor registrations, nor tabards, nor marshals, nor banners, nor gratuitous appearances by cycle racing celebrities, nor PA systems for telling people what a great time they are having on their one day of cycling in the year, nor any of the other caboodle. Everybody would just ride where they liked, when they liked – quietly, happily, normally. There would be no demand for a Sky Ride.

Let's leave Sky Ride. Let's get on with the work that will consign it to the dustbin of history.

The Vole is decorated in Cycling Embassy colours (photo by Alan Perryman)