Me speaking in Lund

Seminars

Cycling, planning and space (Tuesday 28th May):
This seminar will discuss cycling in relation to urban and transport planning and how urban space is related to the marginalisation of cyclists and produced by politics of planning for motorised traffic, with examples from Malmö and Stockholm in Sweden. This seminar is part of the LCC Policy Forum seminar series – book via the website.

Comparing cycling experiences in Stockholm and Copenhagen (Thursday 30th May):
This seminar will discuss how cyclists, in general, view their situation in two Scandinavian cities, Stockholm in Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark. The empirical data for the discussion comes from two survey studies in the two case cities, where Copenhagen is known as a good city for cyclists with a high share of cycling in the modal split and Stockholm, which has a very low share of cycling in the modal split, is not. This event is organised as part of the London Cycling Research Group seminar series, please email me to attend.

Westminster Council’s draft cycling strategy has come in for some criticism, which I’m not going to reiterate here, although I’d agree with many of the points made. Instead, I wanted to think about the strategy in relation to the Piccadilly Two Way Part Two scheme (P2W2). Last week I and other cyclists/cycling representatives met with representatives of Westminster Council and West One, to discuss P2W2, which has come in for some criticism from me and others. It’s positive that the Council have promised to think about our comments – let’s see what happens next. In the meantime, I thought it was worth putting down some thoughts on what I think are the priorities here for cycling, and how a redrafted cycling strategy could help get meaningful and speedy change for cycling in Westminster.

Not feasible? Extracts from Westminster’s draft cycling strategy.

I’d agree with Cyclists in the City that to make Westminster a national leader for cycling (the strategy’s aspiration) substantial change is needed on the ground – in a sentence, easy passage through city streets, with protected routes for cycling on main roads, and lowering the volume and speeds of motor traffic where cyclists must share space. This is in line with the London Cycling Campaign’s Go Dutch principles to which Boris Johnson signed up, and with what we know about why people don’t cycle, and what they like when they do. People – and particularly those groups currently under-represented among London cyclists (like older people) – don’t want to fight their way through congested, polluted streets where motor traffic is either speeding past you at 35mph or entirely blocking your path. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of Westminster streets look like, with the added bonus of confusing one-way systems which generally don’t exempt cyclists.

For me perhaps the key omission in the document is a clear statement of what people who cycle need/want/require. (Including, of course, those who’d like to cycle but currently find road conditions too scary/difficult/unpleasant etc.) We are still in the realm of promotion, where cycling has multiple benefits but makes little in the way of concrete demands on the transport system. (Perfect – like a cream cake diet that doesn’t make you fat… and about as feasible). Rather, what ‘benefits’ cyclists is defined negatively, what is left over when other needs/desires/requirements have been met. You can see this in the language. On page 22, ‘it is imperative that congestion is minimised’, ‘the need to keep pedestrian and traffic flows moving’; page 25, ‘recognising the needs of other road users and avoiding changes that place unacceptable additional pressure on the road network and kerbside’; page 30, ‘significant pressure on footway, carriageway and kerbside space from competing demands’ and page 32 ‘reviewing traffic management plans at all construction sites to ensure cycle safety is fully considered and addressed where feasible.’

As we used to say in Critical Discourse Analysis 101, this tells us something about power relations. Other road users’ (read, primarily motorists, who take up most street space with moving and parked motor vehicles) needs are seen as shaping what can be provided for cycling. Their demands are ‘imperative’, leading to ‘significant pressure’ on the network which if ignored would be ‘unacceptable’; they must be ‘kept moving’ at all costs.

Cyclists’ needs are notably absent from the document: what kinds of cycling environments current and potential cyclists need, demand, want, is currently not there. Instead we have a rare reference to what cyclists need on page 34:

Cyclists also need to be aware that pedestrians and motorists will not always be aware of or anticipating their presence, and that they need to play their part in ensuring that they are well seen and heard.

(This is of course a duty on cyclists, not a reference to their needs).

In alliance with a clear vision of what’s needed to mainstream cycling, a cycling strategy can help enormously by ensuring this is built into other schemes, and quickly. This is particularly relevant in London, where there’s still plenty of money for property development, transport and streetscape schemes. As in New York, schemes that are not particularly targeted at cycling can be used to dramatically improve cycling infrastructure, by making sure that when roads are dug up cyclists always get something too. And hence back to P2W2. Such developments will be covered by Action A7, on page 32 of the cycling strategy, which states:

Action A7 – The needs of cyclists continue to be taken into account in the design of all transport and public realm schemes. Features that benefit cyclists, such as Advanced Stop Lines and feeder lanes, will be integrated where feasible.

The implication from this action is (a) that what is currently happening is good enough, (b) that what cyclists want is ASLs and feeder lanes and (c) that cyclists only need to be catered for ‘when feasible’. Hence, what’s happening in P2W2 is just that – despite £8 million of work (and despite the removal of carriageway space) all cyclists are being offered is paint on multi-lane roads: no protected infrastructure, no planned permeability improvements. I think they should be doing both and I wish Action A7 instead read something like this:

Action A7 – The needs of cyclists will be taken into account in the design of all transport and public realm schemes. This will include the use of protected cycle infrastructure on main borough roads and cycle permeability throughout.

I.e., not claiming that things are working well now, and giving clear examples of (better) things that can be done, without condition. Only words, but sending a clear signal.

Slightly dog-eared cycle map of the Lower Regent St area.

The Piccadilly Two way plans can be seen here, and Cyclists’ in the City’s critique here. In a nutshell, carriageway space (including a bus lane) and some car parking space is being removed on Lower Regent St, Waterloo Place, and Haymarket; the ‘cycling elements’ of the scheme are currently cycle parking, ASLs and some feeder lanes.

Neither Lower Regent street nor Haymarket form part of the (uncompleted) London Cycle Network, but despite high motor vehicle volumes both feature on my copy of Local Cycling Guide 14 as ‘quiet routes recommended by cyclists’. Unfortunately both are far from quiet, having enough cars and taxis to trigger protected space for cycling under UK and Dutch guidelines (before considering buses and HGVs). On the other hand, Jermyn Street, which crosses both and is genuinely fairly quiet, is one-way Eastbound part of its length and one-way Westbound for the other part.

Both the Mayor’s Vision for Cycling, and Westminster Council’s draft Cycling Strategy, stress the need to broaden the appeal of cycling, to make it more ‘safe and inviting’ as the LCC’s Love London, Go Dutch campaign puts it. I’ve filled in a short assessment matrix based on the LCC’s Love London, Go Dutch criteria, to give an initial indication of what’s wrong with the current plans, from this perspective. Have a look at it here (more information about the LLGD matrix as a tool here).

What would it take to make the Lower Regent Street/Haymarket area safe and inviting for cycling? What would the Dutch do?

Clearly, the Dutch wouldn’t expect cyclists to share space with motor traffic on Lower Regent Street and Haymarket themselves, nor on the other major roads in this area. They would install segregated tracks, with no reduction in priority, along such roads. The side streets by contrast could look like the narrow streets of Amsterdam. Where necessary, they would be modally filtered to reduce rat-running motor traffic; reversing one-ways can also help achieve this, as can pedestrianised stretches. Here we see evidence of the latter two strategies. What’s missing are the two crucial components: (a) cyclists being exempt from one-way prohibitions, such as Jermyn Street, and (b) considerate cycling being allowed through pedestrianised sections, such as Glasshouse Street (just North of where Regent Street hits Piccadilly).

So, the ideal would be to have tracks both on Lower Regent Street and Haymarket. Without this, neither can really be counted as cycle-able, ASLs or no ASLs. However, given the needs of pedestrians and bus users, I can see that tracks on only one of the two might be acceptable, given excellent additional measures to facilitate cycle permeability and priority. My choice would be Lower Regent St/Waterloo Place for the tracks, as there’s less kerbside pressure there and a bidirectional East-side track could, given additional connections E-W and N-S, be really useful.

There are steps down to The Mall at the bottom of Waterloo Place, which form a barrier to Southbound continuation, particularly for disabled or encumbered cyclists. However, plans to install a hydraulic lift here would make the N-S axis here (which links to Horse Guards Roads, on the London Cycle Network and leading to the Department for Transport!) crucial for joined-up cycling. Putting tracks in would be a forward-looking step. In the meantime, how about a temporary bicycle channel on the steps to increase accessibility and permeability, and generally make things nicer and easier for cyclists while we wait for the lift.

Northbound, initial quick changes could include allowing cyclists into the Piccadilly bus lane, and facilitating cycling through the pedestrianised stretch of Glasshouse Street. Longer-term, more fundamental changes need to be made, but given the current investment, it makes sense to use it to do what we can for cycling, as an interim measure.

My priority list would include

1. Two-way protected cycle track on Lower Regent St and Waterloo Place, without loss of priority. Essential start in making main roads here cycle-friendly. This is a wide direct road with potential for excellent connections over the Mall. Ideally, protected tracks would also be provided in Haymarket; but see point (3) below.
2. Two-way cycling the whole length of Jermyn Street. Very important for allowing cyclists to avoid Piccadilly, a busy main road without protected cycling infrastructure. Similar measures have been successful in the City, Camden, Islington, Hackney etc… (not to mention The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium…) Cyclists using contraflows are immediately visible to motor traffic coming the other way; it’s proved to be a safe solution.
3. If protected lanes are not being provided in Haymarket, then two-way cycling in Wardour and Whitcomb Street must be implemented as an alternative N-S axis. This is desirable anyway as it would provide an unbroken link right up to North of Oxford Street.
4. East-west two-way cycling on Charles II Street.
5. Two-way cycling in Norris Street, Panton St and St Alban’s Street – and to allow bikes to cross Haymarket in both directions between Norris St and Panton Street (currently blocked by a traffic island), creating a 2-way route that avoids Piccadilly Circus.
6. Cyclists to be allowed to use Piccadilly bus lane.
7. Considerate cycling to be allowed through Glasshouse St.
8. Cycle lanes in St James Street, which is wide and not that quiet.

As they stand, the Piccadilly Two Way Part Two plans offer none of this for cyclists. In the future, two-way cycling on one-way streets, cycling in pedestrianised areas, and safe, fast cycle tracks on main roads should be the default when changes are being made. Motor vehicle use in Central London, including Haymarket and Lower Regent Street, is on the decline. Will Westminster, and other boroughs, seize the opportunity to make a step change for cycling, rather than tweaking ASLs and advisory lanes? The future of the Central London Bike Grid – and, I’d say, building a mass cycling culture in London – depends on it.

Here’s the introduction I’ve just sent to the journal (this isn’t the definitive version, which will be tweaked and formated by the journal, but it probably won’t change much). It feels particularly topical today.

Guest editorial
Cycling and Society

This special section was developed from a selection of the papers presented at the ninth Cycling and Society Symposium, held at the University of East London on Monday 3rd and Tuesday 4th September 2012. The Symposium provides a multi-disciplinary space where all aspects of cycling can be discussed, also enabling discussion between academics, advocates and practitioners. While all deal with high- or middle-income country contexts, these papers come from nations with very different levels of cycling, and the methods employed range from ethnography to cycle route mapping. The writers range from more experienced academics well known in the field to PhD students, demonstrating both the maturity and the vitality of cycling research.

Cycling as a mode of transport generates multiple benefits, some of which accrue to users themselves while others involve broader social, economic, health and environmental impacts (Woodcock et al., 2007). However, during the century of the car, cycling struggled to survive in most rich countries. It was marginalised both in terms of carriageway space and in terms of how we think about transport. In the UK the key ‘Traffic in Towns’ report (Buchanan, 1963) virtually ignored cycling; when it discussed non-car modes this was almost exclusively in terms of public transport and walking. Transport policy simply did not address cycling. While cars and public transport commanded academic and policy attention, cycling was allowed to disappear.

In high-cycling countries within the Global North, despite similar trends, cycling remained high enough to be rescued through political advocacy, with protests in Denmark and The Netherlands during the 1970s securing policy change in favour of cycling (Aldred, 2012). In the UK, cycling rapidly slid from 12% to 1% of distance travelled by the early 1970s and advocacy failed to redress the decline. All mass motorised societies face a constant struggle to restrain car use, with demand for car parking threatening the provision of cycling infrastructure and increasing danger for cyclists. However, in countries where cycling escaped extreme marginalisation, it was at least sometimes possible to debate these trade-offs. In lower-cycling contexts, they often remained invisible, with stakeholders from elected representatives to policy officers and road engineers simply not considering cycling.

Too often, low-cycling countries still reinforce the status quo by assigning cycling very low levels of intermittent short-term funding, and by failing to ensure high-level commitment to cycling (hence people charged with delivery, however individually committed, lack the power as well as the resources to succeed). In these contexts, cycling is doubly problematic. Firstly, it is politically marginalised because it is seen as not involving high-profile prestige projects (unlike, for example, high speed rail); secondly, when cycling projects are proposed, they are seen as ‘too expensive’ because cycling provision by definition is seen as ‘cheap’.

However, current developments suggest the potential to change this trajectory. In the UK, London has seen a substantial increase in funding for cycling and a greater stress on the role of the state in providing for cycling.
The shift in London is not purely incremental; rather, I would argue, it marks a (still partial and contested) break with the more traditional view within the UK that cycling is an individual activity to be promoted or encouraged rather than collectively provided for (Aldred, 2012). A qualitative shift in governance can be identified alongside specific changes in policy content. Cycling has begun to enter a new sphere; one in which talk of a system or service becomes possible, and where the public authorities are the key actors responsible for ensuring the continuation and quality of this service. This situation already exists in high-cycling countries, and cycling can appear as part of a normalised (and, of course, still car-dominated and high-carbon) transport system, where different politicians may have different policies but none would explicitly oppose or ignore cycling.

London still has a long way to go, and at a national level such a shift in governance is yet to happen. The question remains open whether change in London will enable change in other parts of the UK. There are signs of similar shifts in a small number of other UK cities, such as Bristol. Even if London does experience the promised ‘cycling revolution’, will advocates and others be able to translate this experience to other places in the UK that lack London’s specific institutional, political, spatial and economic contexts? The answer is yet to be determined, although there are signs that planners in at least a few other UK cities (such as Southampton) are drawing upon what happens in London. What counts as a ‘similar enough’ context to learn from is never simply ‘there’; such similarities are created, challenged, and denied by advocates, policy-makers and academics. Moreover, London’s position as a global city means change there may shape developments in other countries North and South. Political connections, and lessons taken from successes and failures, are not predetermined but are the subject of repeated contestation.

Change is in the air not just in the UK but also in other traditionally low-cycling countries such as the US, and mid-ranking countries such as Germany. This is not limited to the Global North; Jones and Novo de Azevedo’s paper here deals with Brazil, but some practitioners and policy-makers in other middle-income countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are recognising cycling as a potential counterbalance to rapid motorisation and the health burden and inequalities that accompany it. More money and more political recognition do not guarantee more cycling, but they do help to ensure that cycling enters policy debates and that advocates have access to a recognised policy vocabulary, which can be used to make the case for cycling in particular contexts. This case needs to be made and remade, until cycling is more thoroughly normalised; a burden on advocates whose usually unpaid work is often little recognised.

Much remains to be done; for example, often researchers and policy-makers lack tools to establish the quality of cycling environments, and to establish how equally distributed access to good cycling environments is. The definition of an acceptable or good cycling environment still needs to be debated outside the higher-cycling countries. In the UK, ‘presence of a cycle lane’ has traditionally been entered into models and evaluations, as a marker of a good cycling environment, despite (a) the widely varying quality of cycle lanes and (b) evidence that it is in fact separation from fast or heavy motor traffic that people value, not a ‘cycle lane facility’ in itself (which may not imply any such separation).

More broadly, cycling is frequently marginalised within modelling and evaluation studies. In higher-cycling countries, this may not matter so much: political decisions to fund cycling can be taken without reference to privileged sources of evidence produced through modelling and evaluation. However, in lower-cycling countries, the continued use of modelling and evaluation tools that fail to deal adequately with cycling can lead to a lack of understanding of how to achieve the needed step-change, and a failure to sufficiently shift policy. This may change as cycling moves up the political agenda. The importance of public transport in London has encouraged the development of tools to calculate and compare access to public transport, and more accurately predict the impact of interventions and other changes.

In London, there is still no comparable tool for cycling. Transport for London analysis has found that 4.3 million trips per average day are ‘potentially cyclable’ (depending upon distance, load carried, time of day, and traveller age and disability). Yet unlike public transport modelling, there is as yet no tool that can tell us what proportion of those 4.3 million trips could be cycled based on access to acceptable levels of cycling service. (When I asked a group of London transport modellers what they thought the proportion was, their answers ranged from 10% to 90%). Advocates in low-cycling contexts have long argued that children should have a right to cycle to school, a right denied when cycling environments are unpleasant and/or dangerous. Three questions could be asked in order to implement this ‘right’. Are school cycling environments uniformly good? If not, are policy-makers able to compare schools, ranking them according to the proportion of children with access to acceptably safe and quick school cycle routes? Does this then lead to policy action? If the answer to all three questions is ‘no’, then this shows us something about the real importance of cycling within transport policy, in contrast to policy rhetoric.

The papers in the collection all have strong policy relevance. Chatterjee et al.’s contribution draws upon a policy programme in England, Cycling City and Towns, to analyse how life course events shape responses to infrastructural and policy changes. They highlight the importance of key triggers, including life events in a number of domains (education, employment, family, residential, health, leisure). Such life events can lead to people thinking about how they travel, rather than relying upon habit. Sometimes this leads to a reduction in cycling; for example, when children are young. However, many such potential transition points can, where cycling environments are of sufficient quality, provide an opportunity for swift uptake of cycling. There are lessons here for countries and cities genuinely seeking a step change in cycling from a low base.

In London, cycling advocacy by both established and newer organisations, networks, and individuals has played a key role in shifting cycling policy discourses and practices. My own article in this collection explores how a new movement, called ‘Londoners on Bikes’, sought to negotiate the multiple conflicts, barriers and stigmas associated with cycling and cycling activism in a low-cycling context. It recognises the importance of new and old groups in changing the political landscape of cycling in London and the UK. The use of the internet and social media to share information, critique plans, and offer alternatives has been crucial to the rise of the ‘new cycling advocacy’, and has also helped to reinvigorate more established organisations. New possibilities for cycling encompass both infrastructures and identities, involving interconnected cultural and distributional claims. The paper also highlights the spread of expertise about cycling, and the high level of knowledge now present in advocacy circles. More research could usefully explore how this expertise could be drawn upon to develop, for example, approaches to evaluating cycling environments and to evaluating the impact of interventions.

Also exploring advocacy within a low-cycling context, Lugo discusses the impact of CicLAvia in Los Angeles. On a CicLAvia Sunday, the city authorities temporarily remove cars from a network of LA streets, enabling a diverse range of people to walk, skate, run, scoot and cycle on those streets instead. Lugo, an ethnographer studying the CicLAvia movement from within, considers its transformative potential, not just in enabling a much wider demographic to see LA by bike, but also in providing a distinctive view from the city, challenging traditional car-centric perspectives and offering a glimpse of an alternative.

Lugo’s analysis explores how the marginalisation of cycling intersects with other forms of exclusion and oppression, such as ‘race’, gender and class, and the potential of events to challenge (or reinforce) multiple marginalisations. Her paper raises questions about cycling and equality, and the need for greater consideration of cycling as an unequal system (like other transport systems). One useful avenue for research to pursue here might be the ongoing social and cultural impact of bicycle sharing schemes, which could potentially greatly broaden access to bicycles yet may in practice not reach poorer communities.

Writing about the Brazilian context, Jones and Novo de Azevedo explore struggles to embed cycling within a more pluralistic transport system. Currently in Brazil, cyclists remain often ‘invisible’, with transport cyclists largely comprised of low-income males while higher-income groups cycle only for leisure or for sport. Jones and Novo de Azevedo discuss how cycling fits – or does not fit – in the context of ongoing social and material transformation. Using focus group, interview and observational data, they stress the importance of developing a culture where cycling is seen as a normal part of Brazilian mobile identity. This they see as crucial in enabling the development of suitable infrastructural and policy programmes to support cycling. Like Lugo’s paper, this article poses questions about the relationship of cycling to various sorts of identity (national, local, ethnic), suggesting a need for more comparative work on how different types of social (and political) identity can be articulated with different cycling identities.

Of course, there exist countries where cycling is strongly attached to national identity. One such is Denmark. Writing from the high-cycling city of Copenhagen, Jensen explores the potentially exclusionary side of a context where cycling is associated with dominant city mobilities. She uses a Foucauldian framework and the concept of ‘borderwork’ to explore how meanings associated with urban mobile subjectivity shape experiences of cycle routes. She finds that policy and policy-makers target three categories of mobile subject, all presented as representing something essential about Copenhagen identity; commuters, active urbanites and middle-class families. While Copenhagen’s cycling policies are in many ways very progressive, they simultaneously embody the needs and approaches of particular groups, with Copenhageners with immigrant backgrounds making relatively little use of the cycle track network.

Jensen challenges us to explore the potentially negative impacts of pro-cycling policies, which is important if we are to mitigate these effects. In many cities, for example, high land prices force poorer citizens out of the central and even inner city areas. Distance and generally poorer bike infrastructure can then limit their access to what should be an empowering and democratic form of transport. Research could explore ways of counteracting this, whether through land use planning, investment in very high quality cycle infrastructure and public transport connections, and/or policies aimed at countering growing income inequalities.

Also writing about Copenhagen, Snizek and colleagues map and analyse cyclists’ experiences, good and bad. Snizek et al’s online survey enabled cyclists to map their routes, finding significant associations between cycling experiences and the road environment, cycling facilities, environmental factors, annoyances, congestion and deviations from the most direct route. As the authors comment, these kinds of methods are increasingly popular.
Processes affecting advocacy, referred to above – the growing use of social media and sharing of information about cycle routes – have opened up promising avenues for research. Snizek et al’s approach could be used to model how infrastructural changes might affect cycling experiences, positively or negatively, although in lower-cycling environments it would need some adaptation to take account of the preferences of those currently excluded from cycling. However, if such adaptation were made this could be a useful tool in exploring how changing infrastructure (or other changes such as creating a park or a market) might enhance the experience of cycling particular routes, perhaps to the extent of attracting a substantial number of new cyclists. Combined with knowledge about journey patterns, this could help prioritise investments in countries seeking to increase cycling from a low base.

Van Duppen and Spierings also discuss cycling experiences in a high-cycling context, Utrecht in The Netherlands. They use qualitative methods, conducting ride-alongs with fifteen cyclists to explore embodied experiences of cycling (sensescapes) and contrasting these with planners’ perspectives on cycle routes. In The Netherlands the ride-along methodology is facilitated by high-quality infrastructure making it easy to ride side-by-side and converse while so doing. Van Duppen and Spierings note the importance of the ‘mental journey’, enabled by less intense sensescapes that leave space for thinking and daydreaming. Their in-depth ethnographic work complements Snizek et al’s paper, providing an enhanced understanding of why cyclists prefer some types of environments. Such qualitative evidence can also help challenge sometimes rigid categorisation of ‘types of cyclist’, and demonstrate the fluidity with which people might move between such categories, with implications for policy and planning.

All these papers help us think about cycling in its social context, challenging us to consider (and counteract) potentially negative impacts of cycling policies (here, discussed in relation to infrastructure provision, but one could also consider policies such as cycle training, or land use policies aimed at facilitating cycling), even at their most progressive. They challenge us to ask, what is cycling policy for? How can cycling be mainstreamed into the broader governance of transport while still holding on to its potential to enable progressive policies in other areas; to (for example) help reduce economic, social or health inequalities, or assist the decarbonisation of the transport system more broadly? The papers further demonstrate the diverse range of methods that can be used to understand cycling, and the relationships between cycling environments and research methods. Another productive connection links research and advocacy, with the rise of cycle blogging paralleled by the use of online methods to study cycling.

Many challenges lie ahead for policy, research, and advocacy, especially in the low-cycling countries. If we are to substantially increase cycling levels, more qualitative and quantitative data will be needed to inform policy, as will the better integration of cycling and data about cycling into different types of transport models and evaluation frameworks. We need to draw upon research in different countries and contexts, to conduct more comparative research, and more research in the Global South. This collection gives some indication of the growing research base in a range of disciplines, and provides examples of how research about cycling is already contributing to shaping policy in a range of contexts.

References
Aldred, R. (2012) The Role of Advocacy and Activism, in John Parkin (ed.) Cycling and Sustainability, 2012, Emerald, Bingley, pp.83-108.
The Buchanan Report (1963) Traffic in Towns. The Specially Shortened Edition. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Transport for London (2010) Analysis of Cycling Potential. London: Transport for London, available from http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/analysis-of-cycling-potential.pdf.pdf
Woodcock, J., Banister, D., Edwards, P., Prentice, A.M., Roberts, I. (2007) Energy and transport. Lancet, 370(9592), pp. 1078-88.

Rachel Aldred
Department of Planning and Transport
School of Architecture and the Built Environment
University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road
NW1 5LS
London, United Kingdom
E-mail address: R.Aldred@westminster.ac.uk

FAO Mark Allan, Project Director, mallan@westminster.gov.uk

CC Martin Low, mlow@westminster.gov.uk

Re: Piccadilly Two Way

Dear Mark,

I am emailing about the Piccadilly Two Way plans. I’m a Senior Lecturer in Transport at Westminster University, and, like 12% of my colleagues across all sites (it is higher for our Central London campuses) I cycle to work. I also sometimes cycle within Westminster for work meetings, including to our campus on Regent Street, and my own area of research expertise is cycling.

According to our 2013 staff travel survey, improvements to local cycle routes is a key priority of colleagues who cycle, with 55% citing this as one of their top three measures to encourage cycling. So I was keen to review the Piccadilly Two Way plans, as this area is currently rather problematic for cycling. Unfortunately I am convinced that the plans will not help cycling, but will in fact worsen cycling conditions further.

Details that are particularly detrimental to cycling include the expectation that cyclists will mix with general motor traffic in what look to be narrow lanes that do not meet the space guidelines in LTN 2/08 Cycle Infrastructure Design (or, on Lower Regent Street, wide lanes that will become two very narrow motor traffic lanes), and the cycle lane on Haymarket in the middle of several motor traffic lanes. (There are also potential disbenefits for bus passengers stemming from the bus lane removal.)

However, my concerns for cycling are not limited to the details. Much research evidence from a range of sources (from my own and others’ academic work to TfL and DfT reports) demonstrates that most people will remain reluctant to cycle when it involves sharing space with fast moving or high volume motor traffic. I myself sometimes use public transport to travel to work meetings in Central London for this reason, and I have cycled in London for many years. The streets being re-designed are spacious; they could easily accommodate two-way cycling on dedicated, protected tracks. We know that ASLs and lead-in lanes are imperfect, and build in hazards (e.g. the risk of left hooks) so I am hugely disappointed that this is the standard of provision proposed here.

Has the Council considered instead a design influenced by the higher standard provision we see in higher-cycling countries such as The Netherlands (and now increasingly implemented in other countries, including proposals in the UK)? I would personally be happy to advise on such a design. If the current plans are implemented, I fear many potential and current cyclists will be discouraged by the conditions they will encounter. This will put more pressure on already overcrowded alternative transport systems, making the City slower and less pleasant for shoppers, residents, and employees.

I hope these plans can be reconsidered.

Yours sincerely

Rachel Aldred

Dr. Rachel Aldred
Senior Lecturer in Transport
Department of Planning and Transport
School of Architecture and the Built Environment
University of Westminster
Marylebone Campus
35 Marylebone Road
London
NW1 5LS

Part Two: Copenhagen
I’ve had a couple of trips back over the Øresund bridge to Copenhagen. Even given the high price of a rail ticket (plus half fare for the bike!) I can’t stay away. It’s a shame they didn’t build a bike track as well as a rail and motor vehicle route though – it would be a spectacular if windy cycle, allowing some of the people who live in one city and work in another to commute by bike. The link alone is 12km, so it wouldn’t suit everyone, but some would. (And I love the idea that in The Bridge, which I felt was appropriate to bring with me to watch, the guy could have dumped the bodies on the bridge using a Christiania trike…)
On my first visit I initally stopped at the Ørestad city area, a new town on Amager island where I had a morning meeting with Erik Kjaergaard from Atkins – we swapped notes on cycling policy (and cycling) in Copenhagen and London. Many differences but also some similarities; both cities have cycling targets that need serious effort to be achieved. It was interesting to see the Ørestad area itself – the cycling infrastructure was spacious and comprehensive as you would expect in a new development in Denmark (not in the UK, of course, where I always find it depressing to see how cycling-hostile newer developments tend to be). But it did feel a bit soulless – all the large buildings, the motorway and airport, gave the sense of an international corporate zone, not somewhere I wanted to linger after my meeting.

After a visit to the excellent and now free National Museum, where I was impressed by the massive collection of Stone Age artefacts (and amused by the museum’s description of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as unfairly stereotyping the Vikings) I rode up to Nørrebrogade. (Judging by my Danish acquaintances’ faces, my attempts to pronounce this word are also quite amusing). Along the way I sighed with envy at the three new cycle and pedestrian bridge Copenhagen’s getting; Copenhageners are no doubt (and rightly) annoyed at the delay in finishing these bridges but for a Londoner, it’s hard not to be jealous given our most recent non-motorised bridge over the Thames, the Millenium Bridge, was designed to exclude cyclists.
Nørrebrogade remains a great place for getting shots of cyclists looking effortlessly cool. It’s also interesting because after some struggle, private motor vehicle access has been restricted and the cycle tracks widened. There’s a bus gate part way up. The buses are pretty frequent, but the ‘floating bus stops’ (and the bus stops where passengers get on and off from the cycle track) that seem of great concern in the UK don’t seem a major issue here. Cyclists do slow down and stop; I guess it’s a trade off for having wide, well surfaced cycle tracks with green wave cycle priority – you have a generally safe but speedy (if you want!) environment, but you have to give way to pedestrians at conflict points. Sounds like a good trade off to me and an excellent trade off for all the people who cycle in Copenhagen but won’t in London. I also saw a number of mobility scooters on these cycle tracks, providing enhanced mobility for people who otherwise would have been slow on the pavement or threatened on the road.
Yesterday, I attended the launch of the second Cycle Superhighway in Copenhagen: meeting at Bellahøj, we rode up to Farum, along what the municipality hopes will become an increasingly popular commuter route. Positives first: of course, compared to Cycle Superhighway 2 in London, this looks great. It’s both direct and segregated from motor traffic; the surfaces are excellent and allow super speedy riding for those that can (which is very welcome – the whole route is 22km), the tracks are reasonably wide, and there’s clear priority over side roads. It’s good to see longer commutes being targeted in this way.
The ride was definitely an enthusiasts’ gathering – there were some fantastic Velomobiles, recumbents and other joys for the bike nerd, as well as enough Lycra for me to feel I was in the UK at times (if I looked at the riders, and not the route). I hoped to get more pictures of people riding, but, for a large part of the journey I was near the back. The ride was fast! Even the smallish children managed to keep up a good speed. Riders were regularly overtaken by even faster cyclists, in full-on matching kit, ringing their bells furiously – other people told me the route is popular among training riders.
Which I guess brings me to my critical comments. Given there were so many riding groups, of various speeds, then even though the tracks were wide compared to UK standards, I think they could have been wider. As I set off chatting to Chunli Zhao or Thomas (who I’ve met through the Bikeability project), we often had to stop speaking to let faster riders past. And while most of the route felt very safe, there were a couple of big junctions on the outskirts of Copenhagen that felt a bit iffy (one person I chatted to said there had been a number of collisions there and he’d hoped it would have been improved).
And slightly (but only slightly) facetiously, if something’s ‘super’, why not top the Dutch and put on all the bells and whistles. If people are commuting 22km each way, why not have stalls part way along supplying free ice cream in Summer, and free hot drinks in Winter? Jobs for Denmark’s unemployed youth, and commuters really feel like they are valued
More fundamentally, I was told that the route had changed relatively little; there is now a line of orange paint along it, but much of the infrastructure pre-dated the launch – people I spoke to could only point to the floor lighting on the last section of the route, and some public bicycle pumps along the way, as definitely new. So mainly, it seems, it’s about re-branding, which can be valuable – if you build it and don’t tell them, they might not come – but not about large scale new infrastructure. A couple of people I talked to were worried that this kind of project is being prioritised ahead of putting in place new cycle tracks in the city where they’re still missing (which is more controversial, involving taking away space for moving or parked cars). Commuter routes of this quality in the UK would be fantastic. But is Copenhagen making the step-change that’ll be needed to reach it’s 50% target?

Part Three: My Talks in Lund
On Tuesday and Friday this week I gave talks at Lund University. Lund is a beautiful university town, a bit under 20 km from Malmö. Tuesday’s talk was called ‘Is Cycling Normal?’ and was basically me talking about the sociology of cycling, particularly with respect to some of the findings of the Cycling Cultures project. Friday’s talk focused on cycling advocacy in London, and was based on three articles I’ve written and more recent observations. It was great to discuss both my research and the London and UK experience with Swedish and Danish people; interesting too that there seemed to be some potential similarities between experiences in Stockholm (where cycling rates have traditionally been relatively low for Sweden) and London.

The talks:
You can look at the slides from ‘Is Cycling Normal’ and listen to the audio (MP3, very large file, c.90MB).
You can look at the slides from ‘New Cycling Advocacy’ and listen to the audio (M4A, very large file, c.90 MB).

In my role as chair of LCC’s Policy Forum, I’m organising a seminar series. The launch event took place this week, with London’s Cycling Commissioner Andrew Gilligan speaking about the new Vision for Cycling. There’s been a lot of analysis of the document – and of Gilligan’s speech – and I’m not going to add to this here. Instead I wanted to make a few more general points about where we find ourselves.

The seminar audiences votes on whether it’s getting better for cycling in London

1. There’s an impressive amount of goodwill in London, despite past disappointments. Hope for change is partly founded on evidence that – despite what’s widely agreed to be often very problematic cycling conditions – people want to cycle: where cycling is easiest (both in terms of intrastructure, journey types, and types of people) it’s risen substantially. Also important is the fall in motor traffic in London and the modal shift away from the car towards (predominantly) public transport modes. Two Wheels Good has an interesting post on the cultural shift that’s been accompanying these transport trends, while Judy Green et al’s take is here.

2. As Mark Ames has noted, up to now the take-up of cycling in London has tended to be ‘for choice’ (i.e, people who could afford public transport as the major alternative to cycling in Inner London, where take-up is greatest). Given London’s perenially over-heated property market, poverty in London is increasingly moving to Outer London (and with ‘social cleansing‘ via benefit caps and bedroom tax, potentially outside London altogether). The fear for those of us concerned about equity and social justice is of a relatively cycle-and-walk friendly inner city, peopled by the relatively well-off, surrounding by cycling-hostile outer suburbs where the poor either need to spend large amounts of their low salaries on maintaining a car, or rely on a public transport service inferior to that enjoyed by the wealthier inner city residents.

3. The unequal take-up of cycling in London is problematic. However, it has also been a catalyst for change. This has worked in a number of ways, including:
(a) people taking up cycling have also tended to use social media in various ways, such as blogging, which has become influential (there aren’t many female bike bloggers, it has to be said, particularly in London – this could itself merit some discussion…)
(b) people who are unused to being discriminated against in their everyday lives are often viscerally shocked by the treatment they receive on the roads as cyclists as compared to the treatment they receive at work as respected professionals, expressed most cogently here in a post by the Cycling Silk back in 2011:

When I put on a wig and a silk gown, I am a member of The Establishment and enjoy the respect, privileges and (I have no doubt) full protection of the law should I require it. In contrast when I get on my bicycle, I step outside The Establishment.

(c) the sheer volume and visibility of people cycling in to a particular point (Central London workplaces) at a specific time (commuting) has itself a major policy impact, whether it is seen literally on the streets or made visible when blogs like Cyclists in the City reveal the statistics.
There is an ongoing tension between who’s taking up cycling and the desire on the part of many advocates to speak for the people who aren’t taking up cycling. To get to 5% mode share, we don’t just need more Inner London cycle commuters – we need Outer London mums to think about cycling to their local workplace and/or town centre shops. Maybe with their kids. This needs a major transformation in cycling conditions, which is why the proposal in the Vision for ‘mini-Hollands’ in Outer London town centres is particularly welcome.

4. For me, the most profound aspect of the shift that’s taking place in London is around responsibility, and how that is located between the state and the invididual. I have written about this at greater length elsewhere, but put briefly, my argument is that in the post-war period, while state responsibility for transport policy grew substantially, cycling became invisible within this. Cycling was simply not seen as the domain of the state (as with motorway building or public transport policy), but rather located within the private sphere, seen increasingly as a leisure and/or childhood activity. In 1992, the British Medical Association published the groundbreaking ‘Cycling: Towards Health and Safety’, which inaugurated a new era where cycling for transport was seen as something that should be promoted. However, it remained conceptualised as an individual lifestyle choice, albeit now as ‘healthy transport’ or ‘sustainable transport’. It wasn’t seen as a major strategic investment programme within national transport policy-making. Hence, the ‘risk’ associated with cycling remained individualised, with ongoing pressure on cyclists to ‘protect themselves’ through looking like a cross between Darth Vader and a Christmas Tree.

5. What we’re seeing now in London is a growing recognition that cycling (and cycling safety) are fundamentally the responsibility of the state, not something for which individuals bear primary responsibility. This opens a lot of doors. We can start thinking seriously about a cycling system or service (as we do the Tube system and the bus service) and evaluating it. Who can access it? Who can’t? What level of service do we need? What proportion of children in each borough are able to access protected or extremely quiet (yet still adequately direct and socially safe) routes to school? We don’t have all the tools for this at the moment, as I argued in my earlier blogposts on cycling and transport modelling. One thing I’d personally like to see in London is a cohort study containing a range of people who are interested in trying cycling (i.e. the ‘Interested but Concerned’ in Roger Geller’s classification of potential cyclists). Participants could be, for example, recruited at the RideLondon festival (which will no doubt attract families keen to cycle on roads temporarily shut to motor traffic) and the study could track them over time, seeing if they try cycling, what they think about cycling conditions, why they stop and what makes them take it up again. I’d also like to see more of the existing data about cycling in London made available so that academics and advocates can chew over it, debate the details of the trends, and argue over what can be done.

6. What about the rest of the country? What difference will change in London make? I was chatting to a colleague who lives outside London yesterday, and I expressed my worry that even if London succeeds in its cycling revolution, it might be seen by those outside London as part of what makes London weird (like our generally very good public transport, and our strange tendency to get rid of our cars). (In the Cycling Cultures project, it struck me as amazing how quickly places can gain (and lose) reputations for having long-standing cycling cultures, which other places can never hope to emulate!) My colleague disagreed with my pessimism. He said that given London’s reputation as being a scary place to cycle (something I can personally corroborate: I’ve been told many times ‘You must be brave to cycle in London’, sometimes by people who regularly ride on rural roads with 60mph speed limits), if London cracks it, advocates in the rest of the country will be able to say ‘Look, even London can do it’.

Here’s hoping…

Monday 8th April saw 120 people attend the launch event for the London Cycling Campaign’s Policy Forum seminar series. The series is open to the public, and seminars will take place regularly in Central London. More information here. At the launch event, London Cycling Commissioner Andrew Gilligan spoke on the next steps for cycling policy in London, with Danny Williams of Cyclists in the City fame chairing a lively Q&A afterwards.

You can access an iTunes/M4A (20MB) version of the talk here, or an MP3 (30MB) version here. Both files are 1hr 25 minutes.

What needs to change, then?

Many of the things that need to change are in principle not necessarily that difficult or even different to what we’re currently doing. I was reading a popular textbook on traffic engineering recently, and saw a stepped diagram relating carriageway width to vehicle capacity. It looked like this, with carriageway width along the bottom, and saturation flow (passenger car units) along the left. You can see the capacity shoot up at the point where you go from one lane to two, for example.

I thought, why don’t we see, in these textbooks, this kind of graph in relation to planning for cycling? We know high levels of motor traffic to be an important factor in deterring most people from cycling. Why aren’t we parameterising this, and putting it into models that tell us what kinds of journeys are currently cycle-able for most people, and what we need to do in order to make the journeys people could make by bike (in terms of distance) cycle-able by the majority? In the graph below I’ve made up the numbers, but it wouldn’t be that hard to do some research to establish reasonable parameters, and to monitor changes and differences between areas.

These kinds of parameters (for motor vehicle volume and other determinants of cycle-ability, such as motor vehicle speed) could be plugged into a network model of current trips, providing an estimate of the proportion of trips that are suitable for mass cycling, and allowing us to see which parts of a city suffer most from under-provision. (It might not be where we’d intuitively think). Depending on policy priorities, this could be used to prioritise improving school routes, for example, given that Cycle Infrastructure Design (LTN 2/08) says that children travelling to school will often need routes entirely separate from motor traffic. It could improve decision-making – perhaps there is a high-quality route that can be easily provided, but is it where people want to go now and will want to go in the future? Would it be better to focus on somewhere that might be more politically difficult, but which might yield much greater benefits? (and would the numbers help with that political difficulty?)

Importantly (in my view) we still don’t identify and prioritise a core network for cycling in different areas (a ‘cycle priority network’?), based on evidence about where most people want to go. Cycling needs connectivity, and the ability to accurately predict cycling, and intervene to increase it, will depend on looking broadly across the network, examining who goes where and why (and, looking at predicted land use changes, what journey patterns will be like in the future). We could then establish through research and modelling what level of service is needed to make this network cycle-able by the great majority of potential cyclists (85%? 95%?), and implement these measures as a priority. Bridleways could be an important part of the network in rural areas: they are legally cycle-able but, like main roads, often not so in practice, particularly for year-round utility cycling. (I hope this is the kind of thing that the Welsh Active Travel Bill will start doing). Having a clear definition and clear evidence of what mass cycling requires in practice (and the benefits that will stem from this) could help challenge the tendency in low-cycling countries to downgrade cycling provision when faced with competing priorities.

In conclusion: I would like to see both network models and small-scale traffic flow models incorporating a better understanding of how cyclists behave, and what level of changes are needed for more people to be able to cycle. Choices about cycling (and not-cycling) need to be understood as different from pedestrian or driver behaviour and preferences – this doesn’t mean they’re irrational, just that we haven’t yet successfully modelled them. In addressing this, it may be useful to experiment with different types of modelling; for example, system dynamics models can be used to explore the broader impacts of policy change (rather than looking at changes to specific parts of networks), while agent-based modelling can be used to explore social influence and social learning, both important for cycling as a minority mode that we seek to grow. Both intervening in traditional modelling, and exploring new perspectives are necessary, I think. Comments (either as responses to this post or emails) very welcome…

While the previous section focused on broader, area-level modelling, I also wanted to say something about junction modelling, and how it deals with cycling. While choice models covering broader transport networks could – if they dealt with cycling better – help us think about changing patterns of cycling at a local and regional level, they are not the type of model most often encountered by local advocates.

Most often, if you hear ‘the model says there will be unacceptable delays’ people are not talking about a large scale network model, but about a small scale model of traffic flow through a particular facility, such as a junction. Many of these are ‘aggregate’ models, although some more sophisticated ones are micro-simulation models, which predict individual vehicle behaviour. In theory these latter could deal with cycling in quite sophisticated ways too, although in practice, I believe they generally don’t and cycles are modelled, if at all, as being small and slow car-type objects that impede traffic flow. (With aggregate models, cycles are explicitly equated to cars as described below).

But cycles are not cars. For example, seasonality of cycle travel is very different from seasonality of car travel. Cycling has specific patterns of concentration by month and time of day (given the greater ability of commuters to cycle in current UK conditions). While in London cycling might be 2% of all trips, on particular routes this is much higher and so on a summer Friday morning rush hour over one of the river bridges, cycles might make up half of all vehicles; yet make up far fewer than this on a rainy November afternoon peak. Cycling environments have to cope with existing maximal flows (not just flows in ‘normal months’, which tend to be outside cycling’s seasonal peaks) as well as planning for – and encouraging – growth. But often, even if the desire is there to model pro-actively for cycling in this way, data will be lacking.

When dealing with junctions, relatively simple aggregate models are used to calculate how many vehicles can clear a given arrangement. Each vehicle type is allocated a PCU (“passenger car unit”) figure, which for cycles is set at 0.2. In other words, five bicycles are assumed to take up the same space as one car. In 2009 David Carrignon argued that in ‘heterogeneous traffic conditions’, the actual PCU of a bicycle could vary between 0.19 and 0.3, depending on the lane width. Where you have narrow lanes, in other words, bicycles will slow ‘traffic flow’ more than when there are wide lanes. However, these findings are not generally taken into account when calculating flow and delay. Another factor that would influence the effective PCU of bicycles would be bicycle flow: with higher bicycle flows, cyclists may ride (or stop, at a junction) in more of a ‘cohort’, taking up more space than if in a narrow line. Related research on motorcycle behaviour (much from East Asia) has demonstrated similar problems with assuming that motorbikes behave like little cars – and cycles are even less like little cars than motorcycles are.

Where comparisons are being made between different infrastructural scenarios (bus lanes, wide and narrow general traffic lanes, cycle tracks, cycle lanes, etc.) then information about how PCUs vary could be important. Providing for cycling is often seen as (and criticised for) threatening motor vehicle capacity, but, potentially, such comparisons fail to take account of how traditional British infrastructure design (integrating cyclists with motor traffic and providing multiple narrow general purpose lanes at junctions) itself generates motor vehicle capacity restrictions.

More fundamentally (in my view), modelling cycles as cycles (not as little cars or fixed fractions of a car, which ignores their changing characteristics in relation to infrastructure, cycle flow, and motor vehicle flow) could lead to us thinking more seriously about how we are limiting cycle capacity, and how infrastructure changes (permeability for cycling, dedicated infrastructure, etc.) might affect cycle well as motor vehicle capacity. If we think about current cycling environments as suppressing cycling capacity (by excluding many people who would cycle if conditions were better), this opens the door to assessing and measuring this, and potentially then including a measure of cycling capacity within flow assessments. But cycle capacity would need to be understood as not just how many bikes you can fit in (as with cars), but also how much cycling the junction will allow (or prevent), given that we know most people (including almost all children and older people) simply won’t cycle in heavy or fast moving motor traffic.

Forward to Part 4: Concluding thoughts

According to traditional ‘four step’ transport modelling (area-based modelling, which identifies ‘trip attractors’ such as workplaces, quantifies and distributes trips to those ‘attractors’, assigning them to modes, and working out routing), choice of mode (and route) is based around the ‘generalised cost of travel’. In other words, when deciding how to get to work, we trade off money and time. The ideal commute would not exist; travel time is seen as a pure loss, as equivalent to taking a certain amount of money away. (Of course, cycling again challenges this, with its physical activity benefits: but then, we also know many people value regularly travelling at least some distance, even just a short walk round the block ‘to get out of the house’.)

If the models just traded off time against money when predicting mode choice, cycling would likely come out quite popular, at least in dense and congested urban areas. In 1995 DfT tested out the Dutch modelling package QUOVADIS-BICYCLE, to model cycling in Ipswich; models used in the UK at that time would have been unlikely to include cycling at all. For Ipswich, “the model initially predicated that 30% of trips […] would be undertaken by bicycle.” This compared with an actual mode share for cycling of 6-7%. The model had to be adjusted to predict the actual levels of cycling in Ipswich, whereas in the Netherlands a mode share of 30% would be normal.

If saving time (and money) determines mode choices, the decision not to cycle appears irrational, as with the promotional material that tells us, for example, that the benefits of cycling are 20:1. However, it’s here that the ‘mode specific constant’ arrives and makes not cycling rational again – on the grounds that people just don’t want to cycle.

For time is not all the same. Different categories of time have different values; for example, waiting at a bus stop and walking to the bus stop are both ‘expensive’, sitting in the bus somewhat cheaper. (In a health conscious population, will the ‘value’ of walking time change?) This matters for cycling as a coefficient is given to different modes to reflect the actual mode choice within a population; ‘cycling time’ is thus categorised differently to ‘driving time’.

Wardman et al 2007’s study concluded: ‘Time spent cycling is valued almost three times more highly than travel time for the other modes’. In other words, twenty minutes cycling is as undesirable (travel time being a loss!) as 60 minutes in a car or bus. Hence while cycling may be substantially quicker in time terms, it can then still cost more in value-of-time terms. The undesirability of cycling (in current conditions) becomes built into the model, rather than something the model interrogates and challenges. Factors suppressing cycling then can’t be manipulated within the model and limiting the ability to predict and model for change. This affects other modes too; the growing use of smartphones and laptops on the move has transformed the ‘value’ of time spent on public transport.

As an aside, it’s odd that the high ‘value of time’ spent cycling rarely seems to translate into a policy interest in speeding up cycle journeys, although travel time savings are often where much of the benefits come from when schemes are appraised. But then traditionally, highway scheme appraisal has focused on benefits to drivers using a proposed road. Although now all modes are supposed to be considered, where cycling is concerned, data quality and modelling capacity may preclude its serious consideration. For example, if models don’t accurately capture actual and potential cycling trips, and there are no cycle counts taken on roads that cross a proposed highway site, impacts of a new road on cyclists (including the possibility that cyclists will switch to other modes as their journey becomes too unpleasant and/or too lengthy) will not be well understood. Yet potentially, modelling can help us understand why cycling has gone up (often very dramatically) in some contexts and among some people, while remaining flat on a national level – and how existing rises in cycling could be continued and generalised.

Wardman et al (2007) found evidence that cycle tracks and cycle lanes would make cycling more attractive, both through observing actual routes and by asking about preferences. Values derived from some of their work do appear in WEBTAG (DfT’s Transport Analysis Guidance), with caveats: ‘Note that the impact of a wide variety of different changes can be calculated but that these results should only be regarded as very approximate in general application. This is pending further research in the field and the potential derivation of coefficients for other purposes or the development of a more sophisticated model.’ DfT also stresses that the infrastructure factors are only suitable for looking at short trips and single journey purposes.

So, there is an understanding that route quality matters for cycling, but its inclusion in modelling and appraisal is still seen as experimental. The WEBTAG guidance quoted above, which says further research is needed, dates from 2010, and as I understand it, the infrastructure values it given there are currently little used. In terms of understanding mode choice and routes, I have been told that even relatively good models tend to lump cycling and walking together, and don’t construct a separate ‘cycle network’ layer for cycling route choice. Other models don’t specifically model cycling and walking, but allocate ‘left over trips’ to those modes. In other words, even when modellers are trying to include them, cycling and walking are usually seen as what doesn’t quite fit in and cannot be easily modelled in the same way that car use and, later, public transport have been modelled. Do we need new models, perhaps?

Forward to Part 3: Traffic Flow and Junctions