Boris Johnson’s cycling plan is great – but we’ll still need to ride tough | Bella Bathurst
Mayor Boris Johnson has just announced ambitious plans for the “de-Lycra-fication” of London. As part of his drive to get more people on bicycles and make the capital less intimidating for new and existing cyclists, he’s promising lanes on landmark roads such as the Westway, a redesign of several notorious junctions and “Quietways” through residential areas.
It all sounds great and with luck will catch on across the country. Up above the city, cruising magnificently past Paddington and stationary cars, cycling could once more become a thing of joy. Commutes reduced from hours to minutes, generations of children pedalling to school unmown by rogue HGVs.
As Johnson points out, what stops many people from cycling in London is fear. Entirely legitimate fear, since you can be quicker than Wiggo and lit like the Heathrow runway, but if you’re not intimidated by playing in the traffic around Vauxhall Cross or Elephant and Castle, then there’s something very wrong with your adrenals.
At present, there are a small number of wonderful cycle routes joined together by a lot of very big city and however cleverly you dodge and weave through the backstreets, eventually everyone ends up being spat back on to the dual carriageways. If you’re an experienced cyclist, that’s fine. If you’re not, then you ride scared, and if you ride scared then you’re dangerous. Much of the surly bravado of London cyclists comes from exactly that – being scared, trying not to show it. Proportionately, the rate of serious cycling accidents is dropping every year, but somehow that doesn’t feel like any consolation while you’re waiting for a gap big enough to hurl yourself across four lanes at Hyde Park Corner.
The bonus is that in central London, there are now so many cyclists that motorists have begun to expect them. The downside is that many of those motorists still don’t like them much. Bicycles may have been invented long before SUVs, but in British transport terms they’re considered latecomers. London will never properly compare with Amsterdam, not just because the Netherlands are flat and full of sensible people, but because the Dutch built their cycle lanes at the same time that they built their roads. Bicycles were treated as part of the system. But as Boris already knows, trying to retrofit cycling into an existing road plan is like trying to persuade the Thames to slide up through Highgate.
Realistically, it’s not possible to get all private cars off the roads or reach a state where buses and cycles aren’t sharing the same space. It isn’t possible to totally de-scarify cycling or, indeed, to turn the now semi-feral cyclists of London into regiments of helmet-wearing, law-observing drones. The best option is what Boris is trying to do: make cycling fun again. The Boris bikes are brilliant and they make people want to try them. The new cycle lanes might pull off the same trick. In the meantime, if you want to start cycling, don’t spend the money on a fancy bike, spend it on two hours with someone who will teach you how to cycle in the city, not the way the government wants you to, but the way it should be done.
Bella Bathurst is the author of The Bicycle Book
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