Is London finally becoming cycle-friendly?

Salome Gongadze took up cycling as lockdown orders emptied roads across London. “I was too afraid to do it before because there’s just too many cars,” she said. Now, car traffic has started creeping back up but changes in the way people travel could have long-lasting effects on cities.

Social distancing measures have drastically reduced public transport capacity. London Underground services will only be able to serve 13 to 15 per cent of its five million daily passengers: a Central Line tube carriage that normally carries up to 131 passengers will only accommodate about ten to maintain social distancing. As people avoid public transport, how many will switch to cars? According to climate charity Possible, there is scope for 2.7 million more commuters to travel to work by car, especially in urban areas with high public transport use.

To prevent congestion the government has urged people to walk or cycle to work. In May, the City of London unveiled the Streetspace programme, which aims to provide temporary cycle lanes, widen pavements, and close roads to traffic. Gongadze now regularly bikes alongside Hyde Park through a bollard-protected Park Lane, which ironically is also home to a surprising number of luxury car showrooms (and one of the most expensive properties on the Monopoly board). Before the pandemic, it was also one of London’s busiest and most hostile roads for cyclists: “It’s still a little bit scary: pretty much every time I go on a trip they’ll be a close call with a car.”

Thousands of others have started cycling during lockdown. On June 24, London recorded 51,938 Santander Cycle hires, the most on a working day since the scheme was launched a decade ago. June also saw a 120 per cent increase in the number of people joining the city’s Cycle to Work scheme, which helps commuters get bicycles tax-free.

“What the pandemic has highlighted is that we need to rethink how we have been organising the very valuable and limited space that we have,” says Nicolas Palominos, an urban design researcher at UCL. Car-centric planning, which has shaped cities since the 1960s, sets aside large amounts of space to roads, urban freeways, commuter suburbs and parking often at the expense of the environment, mass public transport, and the safety of those who walk or cycle. “For London, three out of four streets dedicate more space for cars than for pedestrians. Less than 1 per cent of the total street length has a protected cycle lane, what people would consider safe.”

Carwyn Thomas, a landscape architect in Leicester, says that the idea of the car as status symbol is deeply rooted in our collective psyche. “We have this perception still, that a car means wealth and freedom where in reality it is an invisible anchor which drags us all down.” Public, collective modes of travelling have lost over to the private automobile, particularly in areas with inadequate transport networks. “Outside of London there is definitely a stigma about public transport. If you use public transport you are poor!”

In the UK, mobility inequality correlates with social disadvantage. People on low incomes are increasingly living in peripheral urban areas where housing is cheaper but public transport options fewer. At the same time, around 40 per cent of low income households do not own a car. Living far from their workplaces and lacking access to a car, they rely on inadequate mass transport which is cost prohibitive for many. Teachers have warned that plans to axe the children's free travel card in London could lead to pupils missing school due to transport costs. “There is no question that today’s automobile-dominated transportation paradigms are particularly harmful for working-class people, Black communities and other racialised, minoritised or marginalised city-dwellers,” says David Madden, a sociologist at LSE's Cities Programme, an international research centre on global urban practices.

“You can imagine system-conserving versions of urban change that just slap a bike lane onto the status quo, or a more system-transforming approach that places cycling and the decarbonisation of transit into a broader strategy for making cities into places that are more equal, emancipatory, humane and ecologically non-destructive.”

For Palominos, London’s “piecemeal intervention” will not transform transport culture either. Many new cycleways do not actually connect to the wider network and 41 per cent of the city’s population live more than half a mile from any completed or planned cycle route, according to Bloomberg News.

Palominos says borough councils need to join efforts to match the plans put forward by other cities around the world. Milan is remodelling 35km of roads previously used by cars for bikes and pedestrians. Bogotá, a megacity of 8 million, has added 80km to its 550km of existing bike lanes. Accelerating the Plan Vélo, which calls for making every street in Paris bicycle-friendly by 2024, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has added 650 km of emergency bicycle lanes. Eamon Ryan, Ireland’s Green Party leader and a former bike shop owner, has ensured the country will spend 20 per cent of its transportation budget on cycling and walking, with most of the remainder dedicated to public transit.

“Changes to the streetscape can become permanent, but this persistence isn’t total, so they need to be defended, expanded and maintained,” says Madden. “If the kinds of mobilisations and alliances that are calling for pedestrianisation and cyclespace persist, then these changes will persist too.”

Emergency responses to the pandemic have shown that rapid change is possible. But it will take more vision—and the perspectives of those most directly affected—to radically transform cities and tackle the inequality that existed long before Covid-19. “The key is not letting the political establishment get away with tokenistic responses to the multiple intersecting crises within urban space today.”