CHAPTER 5
Build It, and They Will Come
Where Have All Those Cyclists Come From?
José Garcia Cebrián’s moment of success came earlier than expected. The network of protected bike lanes for which he had battled to build for so many years in his home city were still under construction when cyclists started hopping over builders’ barriers to use them.
“Sections had been laid, but they were far from done,” says the man who, as Seville’s head of urban planning, oversaw the installation of fifty miles of fully segregated cycleways in the southern Spanish city in 2006. “Some people were so keen they lifted their bikes over the fences and rode anyway. It was all okay, apart from a couple of people who did this at night and crashed into barriers where a section finished.”
All this paled in comparison to the scene when the network was officially opened, recalls Cebrián, sipping a coffee at a café inside Seville’s medieval city: “As soon as the work was finishing and the fences were removed the cyclists just came. The head of the building team, who’d been very skeptical about the process, called me and said, ‘Where have all those cyclists come from?’ That’s when I knew for sure it was going to work. They came from all over the city.”1
They continued to come. Within a couple of years of the lanes opening, along with other initiatives including a public bike-share system, the number of cycle trips in Seville multiplied elevenfold. This is, admittedly, from a tiny 0.5 percent starting point for trips made by bike.2 The current level, just over 6 percent, is impressive, but nowhere near the standards of an equivalent Dutch or Danish city.
Seville’s green-tarmacked bike network, now expanded to seventy-five miles, has its compromises. Riding around it with Manuel Calvo, the local urban designer hired by Cebrián to build the network, he happily points out the flaws. A lack of space given over for the lanes means they are not hugely wide for the two-way cycle traffic, and occasionally narrow to pinch points, or even feature the occasional tree. But the system feels coherent, connected, and, above all, safe, with cyclists separated from vehicle traffic by a curb, as well as often by a fence.
Seville is seen as a hugely significant example within the global debate over how you get more people cycling. For many years the skeptics’ mantra to bike campaigners in places such as Spain—as well as the likes of the United States, the UK, and Australia—was that they were wasting their time. The Dutch and Danish had preexisting, decades-old cycle cultures, which could not just be magicked up with some cement and a few barriers.
Cebrián, Calvo, and their colleagues proved them wrong. They took a crowded, ancient city with no real history of cycling and summer temperatures that regularly go above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and decided to see what would happen if they just built some decent cycling infrastructure.
The effect, it seems, happens not just in terms of cyclist numbers, but also the wider cycling culture. On my guided tour with Calvo, the lanes were being well used, even outside rush hour. And while we saw riders of all ages and on all sorts of bikes, they had one thing in common: almost none wore helmets and just about everyone was dressed in ordinary clothes. Rather than “cyclists”—enthusiasts, hobbyists, campaigners—these were people who had gotten on bikes as the quickest, easiest way to move around.
Having turned Seville into an unlikely global poster city for modern cycling, Cebrián and Calvo now regularly escort fact-finding officials from foreign municipalities around their network. In fact, they note gloomily, the one place that has shown the least curiosity is their own country. “We’ve had more visitors from the rest of Europe looking at what we’ve done than we have had from Spain,” said Calvo.
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Seville’s example is dramatic, but not unique. Just about everywhere that has built workable bike infrastructure has seen a resultant rush of cyclists. Conversely there is, virtually without exception, no city or country that has significant amounts of cycling that has not rebuilt its streets for bikes. I say “virtually” because of the anomaly of Japan. Tokyo, for example, has almost no on-road bike lanes, and yet about 15 percent of journeys are by bicycle.3 This happens, however, because cyclists routinely use sidewalks instead. The cycling culture is utilitarian and gentle, with most people riding the ubiquitous mamachari, or granny bikes, usually laden with shopping, children, even an umbrella. It’s a compromise that works there, but has never been successfully exported.
Everywhere else it is bike lanes that have proven to be the catalyst. New York City has seen a massive increase in cyclists since Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s conversion to cycle lanes in 2006. Levels were creeping up anyway, rising about 70 percent between 2000 and 2006. But from 2006 to 2014, they shot up 250 percent.4
In London, the first snippet of proper separated routing, around the previously fearsome Vauxhall gyratory just south of the River Thames, saw bike numbers increase 75 percent in just four months.5
Even better things were to come. As we heard in the introduction, when London’s first major separated routes were completed, within just over a month, cyclist numbers were 60 percent higher.6 Andrew Gilligan, London’s then-commissioner for cycling, recalls Seville-like scenes while the new lanes were being constructed, with riders using each completed yard of the “superhighways” more or less as soon as the asphalt had dried. “They were breaking through the barriers when the thing wasn’t even ready,” he says. “They wanted to ride on it so badly.”7
If you get a chance to use one of the new lanes you can see why. Like in Seville, they’re two-way, but wide, smooth and with all the extra safety features you’d hope for, like cyclist-only traffic lights to stop vehicles turning across bikes. What I notice most as I move from the bus and truck frenzy of the preceding street to one of the lanes is a sense of my body untensing slightly. It is cycling as a relaxing pleasure, not an invigorating thrill.
This is one of the oddly fascinating things about infrastructure. It’s not the most alluring of words, reminiscent of power lines and sewage plants. But traffic infrastructure has a huge capacity to shape the way people move about and live, especially in a city. Wherever there are people on the move, much of the way they interact is shaped by the planned environment for different types of transport.
And when it comes to roads, these interactions are far from equal. Speeding traffic intimidates pedestrians, as it does anyone not caged and cocooned inside a tin box. The most unequal interaction of all, arguably, is between cyclists and the vehicles with which, in far too many towns and cities, they are obliged to share space. If you decide that this relationship is essentially okay—and this, often by default, is what has been decided in the bulk of towns and cities globally—then you can forget about having more than a few percent of your population deciding to ride a bike.
This is deeply unfair. Global experience over the decades has shown that if mixing with the motor traffic is your chosen bike environment, then almost all your cyclists will be a small group who are mainly young, predominantly male, and disproportionately gung ho.
Often this discussion becomes reduced to talk of various types of bike lanes. As we’ll see below, to create mass cycling you need to shape the built environment in several other ways, too. And for all the occasionally opaque discussions about curb heights, lane barriers, and traffic light phases, this is about something more fundamental. Bike infrastructure is, at its heart, about a changed vision for the place occupied by human beings in the modern urban world.
Cars Are Guests
To examine how all this can work in practice, I went to Houten, a new town of about fifty thousand people just south of Utrecht in the central Netherlands. While generally little known overseas, Houten is a remarkable place in a couple of ways. To begin, as with all artificially created communities, its center has a strange uniformity of architecture, in this case a style that could be called Early Eighties Redbrick Municipal. But then you notice something else. For anyone used to the constant if barely noticed road hum of most towns and cities, it feels oddly quiet. “It’s not for everyone,” admits Martijn van Es, the affable press officer for the Dutch Cyclists’ Union, the Fietsersbond, who has taken me on a bike tour to Houten. “The people who live here say it’s the best place in the world. Personally I prefer a bit more excitement.”8
Houten is at the more radical end of Dutch planning for bikes, itself generally seen as the best there is. An existing village around which a new community was planned and built from 1978, architect Rob Derks’s design was based on a traffic system that sees cars largely exiled to outer ring roads, from which they can then creep down a few streets at no more than 15 mph. In contrast, Houten’s center is crisscrossed with eighty miles of red-paved bike paths, which are not only completely safe but offer by far the most convenient route for people to get almost anywhere.
The results are quite something. Houten’s train station has indoor parking for about three thousand bikes,9 with steps leading straight up to the platforms. It is almost always full. Cars are far from unknown, with ownership levels just slightly below the Dutch national average. But they are more or less banished from the center. Surveys show that if locals are visiting friends or running errands rather than doing the weekly grocery shopping, something close to 70 percent of them choose to use their bikes.10
All that said, for me the most remarkable element of my trip to Houten was how we got there. Van Es took me from the Fietsersbond headquarters in central Utrecht via a fairly circuitous route (in part as we got lost a couple of times) along urban streets, through the university district, and down semirural lanes. None of this was a preplanned cycling utopia like Houten, simply the everyday Dutch road environment—one retrofitted over the decades so more or less anyone can feel safe and comfortable. For someone used to London it was a huge pleasure and at the time very slightly depressing—all my bike trips could and should be more like this. For about three-quarters of the route we were on separated bike lanes or traffic-free paths. Where we shared space with cars, they approached us cautiously and overtook with care. Inside Utrecht, some streets were officially designated as “cycling streets.” These had prominent signs showing the silhouette of a cyclist ahead of a vehicle with the message “auto te gast”: “Cars are guests.”
When we returned to the Fietsersbond office I remarked to the organization’s director, Saskia Kluit, how unstressful the whole experience had been compared to my normal London riding. “It’s not a miracle,” she said. “It’s just years of hard work. We started in the nineteen seventies here, and you started in the nineteen nineties. So you have another twenty years to go. But then you learn from us, and you don’t have to make the mistakes we did.”
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To repeat: it’s not a miracle. Also, it’s not just cultural. And it’s not because the Netherlands and Denmark are flat, or have temperate weather. These are all the case. But ultimately it’s about choices. This can’t be emphasized enough.
If another nation suddenly decided it wanted to follow the Dutch or Danish model, then the changes would take time. But the only other real obstacle would be political and public will. How you do it is very well known. The practicalities have been refined and proven in the decades since both countries decided they wanted to reverse the postwar trend for car-dominated streets. A series of towns and cities in other nations have tried very similar things and, more or less without exception, they have also seen success, too. So what’s the secret?
At the most basic level there are a few main principles, with a handful of other associated tenets. First is the idea that, wherever possible, bikes should be kept separate from motor traffic on busy roads. “Busy” can be a matter of interpretation, but should encompass more or less any main route.
The Dutch bike infrastructure bible Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic, produced by the traffic organization CROW, recommends physical segregation on any route where the traffic flow is greater than a far-from-huge two thousand motor vehicles per day. The protection must be continuous, meaning at junctions bikes need a barrier, or their own phased traffic lights. If that seems too technical you can think about it in the more evocative phrase of Enrique Peñalosa, the bike lane–building mayor of Bogotá, who we met in chapter 3: “A bicycle way that is not safe for an eight-year-old is not a bicycle way.” This means the routes are not only safe, but they are forgiving, obvious to use, and inspire confidence.
The separation must be physical. Lanes marked with just paint won’t do it. In fact there’s evidence that in some cases this can be worse than nothing. Perhaps the biggest such leap of faith was London’s first generation of so-called Cycle Superhighways, launched amid some fanfare in 2010 as a network of quick commuting routes radiating out from the city center. These were delineated by just a bright blue strip, with nothing beyond the slight possibility of a traffic fine to keep cars and trucks out. This brought inevitable and very occasionally tragic results. A coroner examining the deaths of two cyclists on the routes warned that a painted lane could “lull riders into a false sense of security.”11
After another fatality, my newspaper sent me out to make a film, showing what it was like to ride the painted superhighway.12 It was fairly basic—me giving a running commentary to the ride into a clip microphone while a series of GoPro action cameras strapped to me and the bike showed the scene—but the eventual footage of vans and trucks whizzing past and veering across me into the paint demarcation was eloquent. “You call that a bike lane?” e-mailed one viewer from the Netherlands. “That’s not a bike lane. It’s a disgrace.”
London’s mayor at the time, Boris Johnson, eventually gave in to pressure and began building lanes with curbs. Speaking to me just before he left office in mid-2016 he conceded it would have been better to not bother with the paint at all. “Looking back on it, yes,” he said. “If I had my time again, and if I knew then what I know now, I would have gone straight in with a massive program of segregated Cycle Superhighways. I probably wouldn’t have been reelected, unfortunately. That’s one thing to consider. But that would have been the right thing to do.”
The Human Measure
Another fundamental element of a useable and accessible bike network is that on smaller roads, where separation for bikes is not practical, significant speed differentials should be addressed by getting cars to slow down to about 20 mph at the absolute maximum. Such is the principle of the “cycling streets” I saw in Utrecht.
This tends to be the more difficult element to conquer. Separated lanes tend to work pretty well, as we saw with Seville, from the moment they’re built. Inspiring confidence on back roads needs subtle changes such as traffic-calming measures, speed limit enforcement, and a period of time for motorists to gradually learn that residential streets are for living on, not for speeding through.
It also requires a parallel and even more tricky official effort to make cutting through back streets less appealing by blocking off side-road shortcuts with bike-permeable dead ends or one-ways. The Dutch are extremely good at this. In many cities in the Netherlands a trip that might take ten minutes by bike could be more than twice as long by car, even if you can park at the end of it. So lots of people cycle.
Most other nations find this deliberate inconveniencing of the dominant transport culture a real sticking point. It’s one of the reasons that the Seville’s cycle use has yet to increase above about 6 percent of all trips. Away from the bike lanes, much of the old city remains jammed by cars, many of them parked, or crawling smoggily along at 5 mph looking for somewhere to park. Traffic reduction measures were planned, but have been put on hold by a newer, right-leaning city administration.
I can draw on an example much closer to home. The street where I live is narrow, residential, and not very long. In itself it generates very little motor traffic. But it runs between two bigger roads, and is a well-known cut-through to avoid a couple of busy junctions. And so twice a day it is plagued by rush-hour traffic, the vehicles weaving around supposedly traffic-calming narrow sections, bouncing over the speed bumps, treating the 20 mph limit as entirely hypothetical. The first few hundred meters of my son’s route to school is along this road. He loves to cycle, but as it stands I will only ever let him ride along here on the sidewalk.
Hope came when the street was designated part of a so-called “quietway,” a London-wide initiative to create a network of continuous routes on side roads, particularly intended for less experienced riders, or older people, or children.13 This in part involves using already-quiet streets, but also seeking to reduce car use on other residential roads. As part of this, residents of my street were consulted on the idea of blocking off the road to all but bikes at one end, thus cutting traffic levels by about 95 percent. A majority agreed.
And then nothing. My local council retreated into paralysis, knowing they had to do this to make the quietway viable, but seemingly unable to face the wrath of the minority of car owners. A year later, at the time of this writing, we are still in limbo. I tense every time I take my son to school.
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In some ways, getting out the diggers and building separated bike lanes is almost the easy bit for city authorities. For this to be more meaningful and effective requires something much more fundamental. To get a flavor of what is needed, you can look to the Dutch CROW manual, which has at its heart something beyond just a series of practical recommendations for traffic planning. In fact it’s only slightly overromanticizing the 388-page guidebook to see it as being as much a work of philosophy as of road design.
It is based around a notion called “sustainable safety,” which to an English ear sounds more suitably romantic in its native language: duurzaam veilig. By law, duurzaam veilig must be incorporated into the design of all Dutch roads. If I had my way it would be compulsory, daily reading for traffic engineers around the world.
It is almost absurdly simple—there are just five basic principles—and yet, if done properly, can be transformative for people who live among it. The first idea is that roads come in three types—high traffic volume through routes; local roads where a journey ends; and “distributor” roads, which link the two. Closely connected is the second key concept, that of homogeneity—big differences in size and speed should be eliminated as much as possible. So when motor vehicles travel quickly, cyclists should enjoy physical separation; without physical separation, cars must be limited to low speed. The third principle is that roads should be designed so people instantly know what sort they’re traveling on.
It’s on point four that duurzaam veilig becomes what most British and American traffic designers would probably see as worryingly hippie-ish. People are fallible, it decrees, and the road environment should be as forgiving as possible of their mistakes. This encompasses both design—curbs on bike lanes should be angled rather than straight so a cyclist accidentally veering against them is less likely to fall off—and a wider design culture that helps road users to better predict how others will behave.
Finally, the philosophy calls for people to have as much education as possible on how to remain safe, for example when to drive at certain speeds. But it emphasizes that training can only go so far, and some groups—children, for example—can’t be seen as responsible for their own safety.
These five simple precepts are based around what is known as “the human measure,” an acknowledgment that mistakes are made on the road and people should not pay an overheavy price for those. All this, of course, also brings innumerable benefits to pedestrians as well as cyclists.
This is the key to the role of infrastructure in reshaping towns and cities. After decades of designing urban areas for machines—cars, trucks, buses, trains, and to a much lesser extent bikes—the planners must now try to re-create them around humans.
Building for the Strong and Fearless
When the government officials do begin to focus on the humans, that’s when interesting things begin to happen. In 2006, the transportation bureau in Portland, Oregon, one of the few North American cities to properly understand cycling, put out a fascinating paper that sought to create a taxonomy for the local population when it came to whether they rode, or didn’t ride, a bike.14 First among the four categories came the Strong and Fearless, those for whom even a mass of speeding traffic was no worry. Then came the Enthused and Confident, slightly less committed but still willing to ride in many conditions. Finally were the self-explanatory Interested but Concerned, followed by the No Way No How.
The first two comprised about 1 percent and 7 percent of people, respectively, the paper calculated. About a third were No Way No Hows. That left around 60 percent as Interested but Concerned: people who might be persuaded to cycle if only they felt safe. Why not, the officials concluded, start planning bike infrastructure around these people?
All this might seem a statement of the blindingly obvious. But in many countries it is a realization that has only just, if at all, begun to dawn on city planners. This is in part the legacy of decades of entrenched car-centric attitudes. But this delay in rethinking the streets can also be somewhat laid at the door of cyclists, or rather the small but dominant Strong and Fearless category, who turned their slightly niche personal preference into something of a philosophy.
This is the doctrine of vehicular cycling, hugely influential during the 1970s and 1980s. At best a sort of institutionalized coping strategy, at worst a variant of Stockholm syndrome—the psychological phenomenon that sees prisoners take the side of their captors—vehicular cycling decreed that sharing a road with the big beasts of the highway was not something to be tolerated but instead to be actively encouraged. Anyone could do it, they insisted, with just a bit of training and assertiveness.
Some of the tenets of vehicular cycling—keep your space in a lane, don’t let vehicles shove you into the curb—can actually be quite useful if you’re forced to ride on roads lacking bike infrastructure. But as a perceived ideal in itself, something to which to aspire, it’s insanity. Experience after experience shows it limits everyday bike use to just a handful of people, a group that includes virtually no children or older people and remarkably few women.
The high priest of vehicular cycling is the California-based John Forester, an exotic and occasionally belligerent figure whose opinions colored US bike activism for decades. In the early 1970s, he began a campaign against local laws compelling riders to use bike lanes where they existed. This gradually evolved into an ethos laid out in his book Effective Cycling, first published in 1976 and still in print today.15 Its approach is summed up by this motto: “Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as the drivers of vehicles.”
This philosophy has in recent years almost died away, although a handful of vehicular cycling advocates still hold out, much like the tiny platoons of Japanese soldiers stranded on Pacific islands after 1945 who refused to accept World War II was over. The group Forester once led, the League of American Bicyclists, abandoned his ethos about five years ago.
Anne Lusk, a Harvard University public health expert with a long interest in cycling, recalls numerous arguments with advocates of Forester. “My ideas would be dismissed,” she says. “They would say: you’re not a League of American Bicyclists member; you’re not a certified league instructor; you’re not an engineer; you’re not a hard-core biker—you don’t know what you’re talking about.
“Bless their hearts, they were male, they wanted to bike on the roads, so they wrote the design guidelines. They thought they could all teach their wives to bike in the road and take a lane. And the wives said, ‘I’m not going to bike in the road.’”16
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Their legacy, however, still lives on. The 1999 guide to building bike facilities from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, heavily influenced by Forester’s ideas and only updated in 2012, focuses on “advanced or experienced riders” who are unworried about riding with motor traffic.17
In the UK, the semiofficial textbook for Bikeability, the UK’s main national cycle training program, features plenty of perfectly sensible advice—everything from choosing and maintaining a bike to dealing with roundabouts and turns. But the publication, Cyclecraft, also lists among “basic cycling skills” the recommendation that riders practice increasing their cadence, the speed at which they spin the pedals, as a means of accelerating out of trouble. It advises: “A good cadence to aim for is about 80 [rpm], while a sprint speed of 32 kph (~20 mph) will enable you to tackle most traffic situations with ease.”18
This is meant to be a “basic” bike skill: learning to change down through the gears like a pro rider and sprint away from danger. For an adult enthusiast, 20 mph is pretty quick. For a child, an old person, or a beginner, it’s an impossibility.
Rachel Aldred, a cycling policy expert at London’s Westminster University, says the emphasis on care and skill on the part of the cyclist rather than the wider environment is anomalous. “We wouldn’t think it was acceptable if train passengers had to cross a live rail to get to a platform, and were told to ‘be aware,’” she says. “We wouldn’t accept a company putting up unsafe scaffolding, and the police then acknowledging this by handing out leaflets nearby saying, ‘Be careful when you walk on this side of the road, you might be hit by falling planks.’”19
Anne Lusk, meanwhile, has her own suggestions for the few remaining and largely male proponents of vehicular cycling: “Have them bike in a skirt, have them bike with high heels, on a heavy Dutch bike with a child on the back and groceries on the front. And then have them put a purse over their shoulder and go to work. Then let’s see how it works.”20
Inspiration Out of Necessity
Even though vehicular cycling might be on its way out as an approach, no car-dominated country has, as yet, decided to acquire the Dutch or Danish design manuals and completely mimic the path taken by those countries in the 1970s and ’80s. This is something much complained about by many bike campaigners, especially those in Britain, who lament that such a cycling promised land is a mere couple of hundred miles away by distance, but seemingly decades away by ambition.
And while it’s largely pointless trying to cheat the basic principles of this model, as London tried and failed with its painted lanes, another key infrastructure lesson is that sometimes you have to compromise—do the best with what you’ve got, and accept that other elements take time. This can involve taking innovative and occasionally daring approaches.
For example, while London has lagged behind some equivalent cities in part because of its very cautious approach toward endless consultations and modeling before anything was done, New York achieved more in a similar span of time, in part by being bolder but also through improvisation.
Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s former transport commissioner under Michael Bloomberg, exemplifies this try-it-and-see approach. “There’s a lot you can do with paint, and planters and stones from old bridge projects,” she told me. “We closed Broadway from Times Square in a few months using only the materials we had in the transportation department’s arsenal. You can change a street on a trial basis using materials that are easily adjusted or can be removed if it doesn’t work out. It’s available and it can be done.”
Perhaps Sadik-Khan’s most celebrated single change to the city’s streetscape came through enforced improvisation. Just before her department was due to turn a large part of Times Square into a pedestrianized zone, a planned consignment of fixed benches and chairs failed to arrive on time. Her response was to send staff to a local hardware store to buy hundreds of folding beach chairs.
This, she recalls, ended up becoming the story rather than a route closed off to motor vehicles. “The inspiration came out of necessity,” Sadik-Khan says. “Putting out those eleven-dollar beach chairs on Times Square was an interesting moment. People came out, and all people talked about was those chairs—the color, the design. Not that we’d closed Times Square to cars. It was the same experience in so many of our projects: when you adapt the street, people adopt it. It’s almost like it’s always been there. You go to some of these plazas now and people have forgotten the way it used to be.”21
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However valuable it can be to innovate and imagine, the converse to this infrastructure lesson is that ideas must be fundamentally rooted within what makes cycling useful and enjoyable. This is, apparently, an easy lesson for some people to miss, especially if they are architects convinced that a grand, shiny project can overcome decades of prior experience with bikes.
In late 2015, a funding drive was launched to raise the first tranche in a planned £600 million in private funding aimed to “revolutionize” cycling in London. This might sound exciting. There was just one problem: it was a very, very silly idea.
Devised by an architect and an artist, the Thames Deckway was a proposed 7.5-mile bike lane built on floating pontoons along the river Thames. Computer-generated marketing images showed smiling cyclists pedaling along a bright blue, space-age-looking structure. It was, of course, powered by solar panels. The riders looked calm, they were speeding to the other end of the city, they were safe from speeding motor traffic—this was the future!
Critics soon pointed out the flaws, not least the proposed £1.50 per trip toll needed to recoup the vast investment, likely to put off many people. The designers were also a bit vague about how they would create useable ramp access to and from a structure floating on a river with a six-meter or so height difference between peak and low tide. I asked them for an interview to explain this, and they declined to expand on their plans, which is rarely a reassuring sign.
Worst of all, the designers had seemingly forgotten why people choose bikes—it’s convenient and flexible. You can choose to ride directly from point to point, or else decide to meander and stop off at shops or cafés. Neither of these options is particularly assisted by having to find a steeply ramped access point, cycle along a far-from-straight river, up another ramp, and then to your destination. The Deckway idea also forgot that another key point of cyclists is to humanize a city. They’re not an inconvenience to be put to one side so the real business of moving cars and trucks around can carry on as normal.
Such red herrings, pointless and unnecessary reinventions of bike infrastructure, are increasingly common, and London seems to suffer more than its fair share. In 2014, Norman Foster, the celebrated British architect, unveiled an ambitious and deeply useless scheme called SkyCycle, 150 miles of elevated bikeways built above London’s suburban rail network. It shared very similar problems to the Deckway, not least getting cyclists so high into the air without vast ramps and enormous cost.
Yet another plan decided the best place for cycle routes in London was actually below the streets, using obsolete tunnels in the Underground transit system. Amazingly, this scheme, the London Underline, won a design award.22
This is not to say that fast, direct bike routes are not part of the mix. Both the Dutch and Danes have in recent years begun to build special lanes intended to expand the potential range of bike commuting, especially given the increased popularity of the e-bike. Morten Kabell, Copenhagen’s mayor for infrastructure, is cooperating with surrounding municipalities to create what he terms “supercycle lanes,” trying to encourage people to consider a commute of up to seven or eight miles each way.
But such routes only work as part of a wider whole. A British former transport minister, Steve Norris, once very wisely described the curse of his department as “grand project-itis,” a compulsion to seek expensive, shiny, overdesigned solutions to issues that could be tackled by something far more simple. The Deckway, SkyCycle, and the Underline are prime examples of how even cycling can fall prey to this. Getting more people on bikes, as we’ve seen above, is a fairly simple if often mundane business of introducing many dozens of incremental changes over the years. No wonder architects aren’t often drawn to it.
And what of the three schemes? SkyCycle and the Underline remain nothing more than a few computer-generated images on websites. As for the Deckway, its initial crowdfunding drive flopped calamitously and was abandoned. The project remains just two people’s grand, hubristic plan, and long may it remain so.
Understanding the Golf Effect
As well as getting many more people to ride, and helping to bring the urban environment back to a human scale, good bike infrastructure also has another, very significant role: it makes cycling much more safe. Curiously, a UK review from 2015 found very little in the way of rigorous academic research to prove this case. This is possibly because there seems little point, as the evidence from cities that have built bike lanes seems so compelling.
One of the most celebrated examples is New York. Data from the city’s department of transport shows that from 2000 to 2014, as cycling levels grew almost 450 percent, the number of cyclist deaths stayed fairly stable, between about fifteen and twenty, while the number of severe injuries fell from 440 to 341.23
The department has translated this into what it calls a “risk indicator” for cyclists. Between 2000 and 2014, this reduced by 82 percent. An official graph shows the falling risk indicator and the rising number of cyclists, plotted as separate lines over the same fourteen-year period. Together they make a near-perfect X, as good a shorthand as any for the safety impact of new bike lanes.
The statistics in London are very similar. From 2000 to 2014, as cyclist numbers across London rose by 225 percent, and by much more than that within the center, the number of riders killed or seriously injured per year stayed level.24 In contrast, across the UK as a whole, as the numbers on bikes stagnated, cycling casualties rose.25
Some of this can be explained by bike infrastructure that removes cyclists from potential interaction and conflict with heavy and rapid motor traffic. However, this does not explain everything, not least in London, which had almost no properly separated lanes before about 2014. There is, however, another knock-on positive effect.
This is the idea of safety in numbers for cyclists, first described in 2003 by US transport expert Peter Jacobsen, whose research concluded that when you have additional cyclists on the roads their individual risk of injury reduces, with the same effect seen for pedestrians. Jacobsen said this could be down to drivers becoming more aware of vulnerable road users when there are more of them. Good bike infrastructure makes cycling safer and more attractive, thus attracting more riders, in turn making cycling even safer. It is a virtuous circle.26
Some later studies have challenged elements of Jacobsen’s ideas,27 and safety in numbers remains a slightly contentious theory. But whatever causes it, there does seem to be a notable reduction in cyclist casualties when a town or city builds a coherent road network for them.
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And what of the most thorough approach of all? Does the Dutch system bring safer cycling? The pretty unequivocal answer is yes. A good comparison is the UK, as the countries have broadly similar safety records when it comes to motor vehicles.
There are all sorts of ways to measure cycle safety, but one of the best is deaths per million hours spent on a bike, a formulation that takes into account not just that Dutch people ride a lot more than Britons, but that they often do so at more leisurely speeds. A 2012 study by Dr. Jenny Mindell, an epidemiologist at University College London, found the death rate for English cyclists over three years of data was 0.42 per million hours ridden, as against 0.11 for their Dutch peers, making the Netherlands nearly four times as safe. As the paper notes, this isn’t strictly comparing like with like. England has many more male cyclists than female ones, and men tend to get hurt more often on bikes, irrespective of the road environment. Mindell thus reduced the infrastructure-based safety differential to 3.4.28
But there are other considerations to take into account, not least a phenomenon known—mainly to actuaries and insurers—as the “golf effect.” This notes that while in some places, for example Florida, the number of people who drop dead playing golf is relatively high, this does not make golf in itself a hazardous game. It simply means that a disproportionate number of fairly old people, some with preexisting medical conditions, tend to play golf, and will therefore die while doing so.
For golf in Florida, see cycling in the Netherlands. So many people in their seventies or even eighties still ride bikes there that, inevitably, a certain number will keel over for the final time while on a bike and be chalked down as cycling casualties, even if being on a bike did not directly cause their demise. Saskia Kluit from the Fietsersbond points out that in the Netherlands, if someone dies within thirty days of their having been involved in a traffic crash, the crash is registered as the cause of death. This increases the official casualty rate even more.
Her organization looked in detail into more than seventy crashes involving elderly cyclists. “What we found out was that a large proportion of them broke their hip getting on or off a bicycle,” she says. “Because there’s a bicycle and a person the police will register it as a traffic accident. But it’s just somebody getting on a bicycle. They might not even have left their front porch.”
There was a spike in such incidents several years ago as many older Dutch cyclists tried out e-bikes for the first time and struggled to cope with the balance of the heavier machines, especially initial models, which often had the motor in one of the wheels. According to Kluit, studies have shown the e-bikes themselves don’t tend to be ridden any more quickly than normal machines, and are no more of a risk when in motion. “But what we do see is that the bikes are heavier and people tend to topple over more than they would on a normal bike,” she says. “So getting on and off the bike is now a higher-risk moment.”
All this must be placed in context, she stresses: “What you have to bear in mind is that in the Netherlands about five million to seven million people a day step on a bicycle. We have about five hundred deaths a year in traffic, and about two hundred are cyclists.”29
Dr. Rachel Aldred from Westminster University has taken this effect into account to recalculate Dr. Jenny Mindell’s figures about the relative safety of cycling in the UK and Netherlands. Her conclusion? If Britain had had Dutch-style cycling infrastructure during 2012, rather than 118 cyclists dying, the true figure might have been nearer thirty-five. That’s more than eighty lives saved, every year, or a death rate less than a third of what it was.30
Given all this, why are more cities and nations not building the sort of bike networks shown to get many more people cycling and then keep them safe? The answer, as ever, is a toxic mixture of vested interests, inertia, and a lack of political vision, which we turn to next.