Me? Cycle in London? No! I'll die.
You've got to be stark raving mad to cycle in London.
I would cycle, but there are too many roads.
I tried cycling once, but there was a bus on the other side of the road. Aargh!
What's wrong with these people? Cycling is good exercise, it's free, it's fun
You can change your route as you please, you can park anywhere, it's usually faster than the bus,
sometimes faster than the Tube, and yet for some reason, cyclists in London are still
a rare and strange breed.
So, why isn't cycling normal in London? Is it to do with the way the streets were built?
Or is it something embedded in our culture?
Or is it a complicated and nuanced mixture of the two combined with several other surprisingly interesting
factors that will take about ten minutes to discuss?
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Cycling infrastructure in London has been around longer than you might think.
As far back as the 1930s when hardly anyone drove, the wise town planners decreed that
cars and bikes don't mix.
New suburbs in Morden, Perivale and Romford were furnished with shiny, wide, segregated,
cycle tracks. The first of its kind was opened by transport minister Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1934.
But they weren't really used much.
Cycling groups at the time hated these so-called cycle tracks.
They were worried that they'd be forced to use them and then banned from regular roads.
Indeed, that's exactly what Leslie Hore-Belisha wanted, saying that cyclists were
"the most dangerous people on the road today."
So a cycling revolution never came. But a new revolution was just around the corner.
Introducing the new Car.
Think you can't afford a car? Thanks to technology, the new car is more affordable than ever.
You can afford the new car.
With the new car, you can drive around in your new car.
- Do you like your new car? - I love my new car. (giggles)
(continues giggling)
As cars became more affordable, the roads became more full of them. And so, the 1960s planners
in their finite wisdom, altered London's existing streets to make more room for cars.
and cyclists were completely forgotten about.
Historic Hyde Park Corner was turned into a massive scary roundabout where every lane is the wrong lane.
So was Archway, Elephant and Castle, Waterloo and Hammersmith.
(car horns)
The Westway was built. Bleurgh! And nearly all the 1930s suburban cycle tracks disappeared.
Some becoming lanes for cars, others becoming parking spaces.
Unsurprisingly, over the next few decades, the number of cyclists in London plummeted.
* crash - Oww!!
This terrifying video from about 1984½ which, believe it or not, is trying to promote cycling in London
shows just how treacherous and horrible life on two wheels had become.
it was Cars 1, Cyclists dead.
Meanwhile, in Europe...
Cities like Amsterdam which in the 70s had similarly lethal roads to London,
not to mention a few dead children, decided to do something brave.
Over the next three decades, the historic streets were totally transformed to prioritise pedestrians & pedallers.
Cars were banned from some streets, and new segregated, wide, uninterrupted, smooth cycle paths
were built in the lanes where people used to drive.
Turning Amsterdam inside out wasn't easy and it didn't happen overnight, but eventually cycling became
the normal, default way of getting around. And it was cars that had to learn to wait their turn,
keep out of the way, and go the long way round.
Now that doesn't mean that the Dutch are bike-mad cycling enthusiasts. That's a bit like saying that
everyone in Britain is obsessed with vacuum cleaners just because everyone's got one.
- In Holland - The Netherlands!
...the Netherlands, there's no such thing as a cyclist.
These people are teachers, doctors, lawyers, students,
systems analysts, chartered quantity surveyors and porn stars.
So why didn't this happen in London? Actually it's quite hard to say.
Maybe it's because we Brits have always been overly attached to our cars.
In the 80s, cars were a status symbol. Margaret Thatcher famously apparently probably said...
"A man over 30 who finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure."
This meant that politicians and planners who wanted to make cycling better always did so with their
hands tied behind their back. They couldn't do anything to get in the way of our lovely cars.
Another possible reason is the way London was run for so many years.
After Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986,
cycle infrastructure and the like was provided by London's 32 bickering boroughs.
So there was no one to provide a city-wide shift in culture. But that would all change in the year 2000.
For the first time London had an Assembly and a directly elected mayor
with the power and budget to think big.
Ken Livingstone... * ribbit
and the newly formed Transport for London, or TfL...
had to tackle London's chronic congestion and pesky pollution, & they saw that cycling could play a vital role.
Although late to the party, with the right investment, London had the potential to become
a cycling mecca just like Amsterdam. After all...
It's got the same climate, it's flat (mostly), the streets are wide enough, and most journeys in London
are a perfectly bikeable less than 2 miles.
It was totally doable. They had to do it soon, and they had to do it now.
Nearly more than 7 years later, Ken Livingstone stole an idea from Paris: The Cycle Hire Scheme.
Docking stations were to be planted all over central London
with bikes that were too heavy and conspicuous to want to steal.
And anyone with a bank card and a pair of legs could hire them for a small fee.
It took until 2010 for the scheme to get going, by which time London had a new mayor whose idea it wasn't
giving the scheme the misleading but memorable and durable nickname "Boris Bikes".
They were an instant smash, popular with locals and wobbly tourists alike.
They helped promote the idea that urban cycling wasn't just for lycra-clad enthusiasts, but for everybody.
With so many new wibbly wobblies on the road, it was more important than ever that London had
safe streets to cycle on. And so, that very same year, along came the Mayor's most boldest plan so far:
The Cycle Superhighways.
This was a new special type of bicycle motorway for commuters that was long distance, clearly labelled,
and painted luminous bright blue to match the colour of Barclays who were sponsoring the whole thing.
12 cycle superhighways were planned, numbered like hours on a clock radiating out from central London.
The first to open in 2010 was CS7
which went over the underused Southwark Bridge, squiggled around Elephant and Castle
and followed the Northern line all the way down to Colliers Wood.
Next came CS2 which went east from Aldgate, through Whitechapel, up to the future Olympic Park at Stratford.
But were these superhighways any good? Er... no.
- Although very... - AAAARGH!!
AAARGH!! ... although very well signposted and a lovely shade of blue,
there was nothing to physically separate cyclists from passing cars, buses and lorries.
Sometimes the blue paint would stop abruptly, or merge with a bus lane or fill up with parked cars.
Timid new cyclists, the very people this scheme was designed to make feel safe, didn't feel safe at all.
More worryingly, newish and confidentish cyclists were lulled into a false sense of security.
They'd start on an easy bit, and then when the blue paint ran out, splat.
Venera Minachmetova, a 24 year old Russian businesswoman was killed by a lorry
at the notoriously inadequate Bow Interchange, one of 5 cyclists to die on the capital's streets in just 2 weeks.
It led to protests calling for the Mayor and TfL to stop killing cyclists.
A closer look at the original Superhighway designs reveals that they were dangerously ill-thought through.
According to this map, CS11 was supposed to go up the very narrow Kilburn High Road.
And where exactly was that meant to go?
So TfL went back to the drawing board and took it more seriously this time.
The next generation of cycle superhighways from 2013 onwards was a massive improvement.
Physically separated from traffic with features like dedicated traffic lights and floating bus stops,
these were proper cycle paths, worthy of the Dutch.
Have these new superhighways been a success? F*** yes!
Cycling on these routes has increased a whopping 60%. At rush hour 60% of all journeys are bikes.
They even have cycling traffic jams. It demonstrates quite demonstrably that if you build it, they will come.
Spurred on by the success of the cycle superhighways, the city was starting to send itself cycling silly. Look!
Torrington Place is closed to cars westbound.
Look! Bank junction is buses and bikes only on weekdays.
Look! Camden are filling their streets with armadillos. ARMADILLOS!
We're even starting to correct our mistakes from the 60s, turning former big scary roundabouts
into much safer, albeit confusing two-way, inside out, question mark shaped junctions.
in Archway, Elephant and Castle, Waterloo, not Hammersmith though - it's too late for Hammersmith.
So everybody's happy... or are they?
The cycling revolution has attracted criticism from some groups like... (game show buzzer)
- Ooh, bad luck, and you're out of time.
But you did very well. You did the history, you did the Superhighways, you even went to Amsterdam.
But there's still so much more to talk about. Will you come back for part 2?
- Er, yes I will. - Excellent! We look forward to it, don't we?
See you after the break!
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