Safety in Infrastructure

Sadly, I don’t think the CycleNation website will be able to find the space to carry news of these research findings:

Certain types of routes carry much lower risk of injury for cyclists, according to a new University of British Columbia study.

Cycle tracks (physically separated bike lanes) carries the lowest injury risk for cyclists, at about one-tenth the risk. 

Cycle tracks and other bike-specific infrastructure are prevalent in the cycling cities of Northern Europe, but have been slow to catch on in North America,” says Kay Teschke, a professor in UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and lead author of the study. “Adoption of safer route infrastructure would prevent crashes from occurring in the first place

Cyclenation Watch

David Arditti gives Simon Geller, Cyclenation and the CTC a good kicking here.

The Cyclenation website also stands accused of misrepresentation..

This brings me to Dave Horton and last month’s Building Cycling Cultures Conference in Leicester. As I pointed out recently, this was one piece of cycling news that the CTC website completely ignored.

No one could make the same accusation against Cyclenation. This is what the website reported:

Excellent and inspiring conference in Leicester last weekend

The whole event was well planned and included a selection of different cycling related events and activities.The tours in the morning took in the pedestrainised [sic] zone with cycling allowed, an architectural tour and a visit to 2 of the city's recycling projects. The visits to the 2 projects were really interesting and inspiring one was Future Cycles the other was Bikes 4 All both were excellent projects focussing on getting bikes back out there! Karen Overton from New york [sic] held a great workshop on her work in the city inspiring young adults and children through the power and addiction of bike repair.
The subject of segregated cycle lanes was covered by another visitor from New York. Jon Orcutt works for the New York Department of Transportation who have introduced a radical programme of new cycle lanes in the city and his presentation was both amusing and information.# [sic]
The main theme was one of understanding the findings and implications of 2 pieces of academic research one by Dave Horton (Lancaster University): Key findings from the Understanding Walking & Cycling project and the other by Rachel Aldred (University of East London): Key findings from the Cycling Cultures project. More discussion of these will be available soon but in the meantime check out the Cyclenation Googlegroups for a taster.
8th June 2011

source.

Reading this, you would never know what those Key findings by Dave Horton were. Five links are supplied but none of them is to those research results, which would obviously be anathema to John Franklin, since Horton believes mass cycling requires very high quality and continuous segregated cycling infrastructure on our biggest and busiest urban roads. Like the CTC, Cyclenation News fails to link to the two relevant features on the Guardian website. Instead ‘The subject of segregated cycle lanes’ is attributed solely to another speaker, and the link supplied is all about a cycle lane in New York, not the topic of segregation.

In other words, the issue of separate cycling infrastructure is fudged and evaded. However

discussion of these [Key findings] will be available soon

I’m looking forward to reading it.

Bike Week Blues

(Above) Bike week propaganda.

(Below) Bike week reality. High Road Leyton.

Bicycle Association chairman Phillip Darnton said: "We know that 77 per cent of people in the UK own a bike, but only 14 per cent use them regularly and a major barrier to people getting back on two wheels is often something as simple to fix as a dodgy brake or puncture.

Andrew Pankhurst, from Cycling Scotland, thinks that learning to fix bikes will get more people cycling. He said: “So many people have got bikes languishing in sheds, gathering dust, when just a few minor repairs would get them back out on the road again.

“People have concerns about the safety of cycling, but statistically it’s one of the safest modes of travel. It’s maybe more the fact that people don’t feel confident on the roads when they’re sharing it with other traffic. Cycle training is a fantastic way of getting your confidence up on a bike.”

The two examples cited above are perfect instances of what David Arditti means when he writes:

The longer Team Green Britain, or any of the other organisations in the Environment Issue Avoidance Industry that is most of UK cycle campaigning (and, yes, this means you, CTC and CCN) [Cyclenation, whose new Honorary President is Philip Darnton] keeps wittering on about how people are not cycling because they "lack training", or "lack confidence on the roads", or "don't know what to wear in wet weather" or "can't find the right routes" or "lack the skills to repair a bike", or any of these other bits of patronising tosh, the longer we delay solving the problem, the more years go by with derisory levels of cycling in the UK, the more money we waste on ineffective cycle promotion and pointless studies of cycling, the more people take up cycling and then quickly give it up again, the more people die of avoidable obesity-related health conditions and from the effects of pollution, the more we destroy our cities and countryside with motorways and concrete and car-parking, the more we live in de-humanised car-centric communities

In 2008 Cycling Scotland carried out a survey into why cycling had such a very low modal share in Scotland.

When looking at the solutions people suggested for overcoming the barriers identified for cycling, the overwhelming request seems to be for segregated cycle facilities, away from traffic where possible.
The graphs show that while there is a widespread opinion among cyclists and non-cyclists that some form of cycle specific route would encourage them to cycle more, the preference is clearly for off road facilities. Both groups felt that these would be more likely to achieve a higher growth in cycling levels.

Having made a discovery that was unpalatable to its notion of cycling, the organisation then, by a curious sleight of hand, converted it into something else altogether:

One thing that is interesting to note is that despite large numbers of people saying they would like to see less traffic on the roads, their suggested solution to this is segregated cycle lanes. People seem to assume that the prospect of reducing traffic on the roads is not a realistic option, but if we are to act on the wishes of a public who want less traffic, then maybe traffic reduction should be something for us to consider.

Ah, yes – making ‘traffic reduction’ the priority instead. Well we all know where that came from.

Now here’s something which needs to be printed out in large capital letters and stuck on the wall above the desks of the aforementioned encouragers of cycling.

When I asked Klaus Bondam, the Mayor of Copenhagen, what was the most difficult but most important decision he has made to make Copenhagen cycle friendly he gave a clear answer: replacing car parking space with spacious, segregated cycle lanes.

Oh no, sorry. Today's Independent has a better idea for Bike Week.

How to feel confident in the saddle
Feel protected That means wearing a helmet

Yeah, right. See if you can spot the helmet in the photo in the previous post below.

What won’t bring about mass cycling (8) legislation and education to make drivers behave better towards cyclists

(Above) The first rule of learning to drive is that cycle lanes like these can be parked in quite legally seven days a week, at any time. This is the London Cycle Network, in which lots of small blue rectangular signs guide cyclists from one crappy, car-sodden location to the next one. Leyton Green Road.

(Below) A learner driver is instructed in the art of parking correctly in an ASL. Snaresbrook Road.

(Below) This probationer has passed her driving test and has understood the importance of driving into an ASL at red.

Traditional cycle campaigning in the UK is committed to improving the lot of vehicular cyclists in a motorised environment. Historically, this strategy has been a catastrophic failure in terms of boosting modal share. As every survey ever taken has shown, and as even most campaigners admit, fear of traffic remains by far the greatest deterrent to new and returning cyclists.

However, instead of addressing this fear by campaigning for cycling infrastructure which separates cyclists from motor vehicles, traditional campaigning sees the problem as being rooted in individuals, not systems. The guru of British cycle campaigning is John Franklin, who is treated with enormous reverence by the British cycle campaign establishment:

Maintaining our right to cycle on any road (other than motorways) must always be a top priority, for if we lose that right we can have no expectation of being treated any better elsewhere.

I'm pleased that most of the cycling community is united on this, but there have been exceptions and I think that this has fuelled the 'cycling is dangerous' myth that invariably leads to calls for cycling to be restricted. I also think that in the UK there remains a general recognition by the public at large that cyclists ought to be on the roads and we need to reinforce that perception and not weaken it.

At a public level we need to tackle the perception that has grown up over the past 20 years that cycling is inherently 'dangerous'. It isn't and it's easy to prove

On the one hand campaigners believe that the non-cycling majority must be persuaded that cycling is safe, that the more people who cycle the safer it gets, and that nervous individuals can be taught to cope through the medium of cycle training. But that still leaves the question of what to with motorists.

As many cyclists have noticed, there are quite a few drivers out there on the roads whose driving standards might be deemed antagonistic to cycling in various ways – even, you might say, dangerous.

One position on this is to blame cyclists. If cyclists are badly behaved (cycling through red lights or on footways, for example), then they cannot complain if drivers also behave badly. Cyclists must therefore win respect for cycling by demanding that all cyclists adhere to a car-centric status quo and obey rules designed to manage motor vehicle flow and parking. This kind of argument even gets embedded in local authority policy statements. Thus the London Borough of Redbridge Cycle Action Plan solemnly states that

Anti-social behaviour by cyclists undermines other efforts to develop cycling in Redbridge and creates conflict with other road users. Through engineering, education and enforcement, a mutual awareness and respect between cyclists, pedestrians and other road users will contribute to increasing the attractiveness of cycling.

By this twisted logic, what is holding back cycling in Redbridge is not a transport structure entirely built around the hegemony of the private car but naughty cyclists who have adapted to a deeply hostile cycling environment in ways deemed delinquent. But of course even if every cyclist in Redbridge scrupulously obeyed the rules this would not make one iota of difference in terms of ‘increasing the attractiveness of cycling.’ Redbridge is a deeply unattractive place to cycle for reasons which have nothing whatever to do with the behaviour of some cyclists. The same applies to all the other ‘Biking Boroughs’ including Merton, where, to give just one example,

The crossing at Kenley Road is a sheep-pen affair with a cycle time so long most people don't bother waiting.

More delinquency!

However, a more mainstream argument within the vehicular cycling campaign community is that the behaviour of drivers must be directly addressed. There are, it is argued, three ways of doing this.

The first one is through ‘education’.

Many people are campaigning for better provision ON THE ROAD and educating drivers to be safer around cyclists. You have to admit that if cycling on the road was safer then there would be no/less need for segregated cycle routes.

Thus at last year’s Cyclenation conference in Edinburgh, Ian Aitken from Cycling Scotland passed on the thrilling news that the Action Plan for Scotland aspired to cycling accounting for 10% of all journeys by 2020 (the kind of delusional fantasy that gets cycle campaigners yapping excitedly and which will require the traditional amnesia when in nine years’ time cycling’s modal share in Scotland predictably remains at one per cent). Among the strategies cited to get more children cycling to school was a “Give Me Cycle Space” campaign – posters asking drivers to be nice to child cyclists. Education. (Doesn’t seem to work with the environment, incidentally – in one survey just 0.1% of drivers registered concerns about pollution and the environment.)

(Above) This Isuzu Trooper driver parks in the cycle lane and pops into the bank. R873 SOY. At the same time, just across the road (below) this Jeep driver parks their 4X4 both across the cycle lane and on the footway, to visit the school uniform shop on Hoe Street, E17. Reg. PG02 XPK.

The second one is new legislation to change driver behaviour.

We recognise the role that good quality infrastructure has to play, but we feel that the elephant in the room is driver behaviour in the UK – something that has been addressed almost everywhere else in Europe but not here.

This alludes to

"stricter liability" laws which mean that Dutch and Danish drivers really do respect the priority of cyclists using cycle tracks at junctions.

There’s nothing wrong in principle with ‘strict liability’ legislation, but it has nothing at all to do with driver behaviour (and as I have previously argued, it is often misinterpreted as referring to criminal law). In reality Dutch drivers behave better to cyclists because they are virtually all cyclists, unlike Britain where two drivers out of three never cycle. ‘Strict liability’ was not the catalyst for mass cycling in the Netherlands – infrastructure was. The legislation came much later. The significant variations in modal share within both the Netherlands and Denmark are down to infrastructure, not legislation affecting insurance matters for drivers involved in collisions with cyclists.

(The idea that European drivers are nicer to cyclists than British ones might also be regarded as optimistic when they turn up in the UK – I don’t think the absence of ‘strict liability’ here is really why some foreign drivers behave like this.)

‘Strict Liability’ would, in any case, be a drop in the ocean in a car-centric society in which

danger from motor traffic – particularly to the non-motorised – is characterised by official tolerance… enforcement and sentencing policy for the majority of rule and law breaking driving [is] non-existent or lenient.

Compared to Health and Safety at work, maritime safety, aviation safety or rail safety, regulation of danger on the road is much more likely to be based on a “voluntary code” which involves accepting behaviour which endangers other road users.

The third proposal for changing the behaviour of British drivers is to make cycling part of the driving test. This is the CTC’s latest frothy enthusiasm.

This would create a generation of bike aware drivers whose experience of cycling in traffic would make them better disposed to accommodate their more vulnerable brethren.

Oh yeah? Since when did passing the driving test have any influence on the subsequent behaviour of drivers? There is none whatsoever that I know of. The idea that making learner drivers spend time cycling in traffic would create generations of cycling-friendly drivers is just the kind of crackpot delusion that appeals to establishment cycle campaigners. Their top priority remains cycling in traffic, and the demonstrable and continuing failure of this campaign strategy matters not a jot.

There is a deep rooted, unquestioned assumption here namely that the key cycling skill is about dealing with motor vehicles. The argument becomes a circular one; the skill that matters is dealing with motor vehicle traffic, ergo anything that reduces the relative significance of that skill is undesirable.

And of course even if we had more niceness by drivers, with lots of lovely posters reminding them to watch out for cyclists, and strict liability legislation, and cycling part of the driving test, these would have no impact whatever on volumes of traffic or car dependency. You would still be left cycling on streets like these.























(Above) Conditions for cyclists on Lea Bridge Road, Leyton

(Below) Conditions for cyclists in the car-sick 'Biking Borough' of Redbridge. A113, Wanstead.

What won’t bring about mass cycling (5) vehicular cycle campaigning

People who know about cycling: London borough cycling officers meet campaigners






1. Some history

Let’s start with some history.

From 1950-1975 cycling was excluded from the government’s transport planning. Car ownership increased from half a million cars in 1960 to 4.6 million in 1981. Cycling vanished from city centre streets. Bike lanes became filled with parked cars. Proposals to put dedicated cycle lights at major junctions were resisted on the grounds of cost and that they would slow down drivers. Car use was believed to be of major economic importance. One study revealed a situation in which 83 per cent of households owned a bicycle but only one in six ever used them for utility cycling. There was a 70% modal share drop in cycling between 1950-1970.

Sound familiar? But this is a description of the Netherlands. To learn how this country reversed its car dependency and transformed itself into the most successful cycling country in the world a good place to begin is The Dutch Bicycle Master Plan, a document I suspect few British cycling campaigners have ever heard of, let alone read.

Today the Netherlands has about 29,000 km of segregated cycle path (a figure which excludes "off-road" paths) and 7000 km of on road cycle-lane, and about 120,000 km of road. Segregated cycling infrastructure lies at the heart of Dutch cycling provision but it is reinforced by a whole range of other measures, some of which are familiar to British cycling but only in a hideously sub-standard or car-centric format: permeability, contraflows, road closures, traffic calming.

The basic principle of the Dutch cycling renaissance is separation of cyclists from motor vehicles and the privileging of cycling routes over motor vehicles in town centres and residential areas. Around half of kilometres cycled in the Netherlands are on segregated cycle paths; the other half is shared with motor vehicles. However the kinds of roads where cyclists share the road have low volumes of traffic and low vehicle speeds. And of course just about every driver is also a cyclist.

Around 40 per cent of kilometres cycled in urban areas are on cycle paths. These are largely autonomous cycle paths alongside busy traffic arteries. There are also sometimes bicycle lanes. The bicycle lane has a legal status. Motorists may not stop or park on it. Bicycle lanes are often used in traffic arteries where there is no room for autonomous cycle paths.

At junctions the safety and flow of cycle traffic is a decisive factor, determining whether the best solution is lights, a roundabout, or a priority crossing. Traffic lights in the Netherlands generally have separate indicators for bicycles. A number of facilities have been introduced to increase the flow and safety of cyclists. These include detection sensors, simultaneous green lights for cyclists in all directions, and display timers giving the waiting time. 70 per cent of the delays in urban areas are caused by traffic lights, which means that other alternatives are preferred, most notably roundabouts with segregated cycle paths and priority for cyclists in built-up areas. The bicycle street allows limited access for cars but the motorist is a guest. (For more, see this)

And now let’s consider one aspect of cycle campaigning in Britain. Whereas the basic principle of the Dutch cycling renaissance is separation of cyclists from motor vehicles, this has always been vigorously opposed by Britain’s leading cycle campaign organisation, the CTC.

The first (and one of the very few) dedicated roadside optional cycle tracks was built, as an experiment for the Ministry of Transport, beside Western Avenue between Hanger Lane and Greenford Road in 1934. It was thought that "the prospect of cycling in comfort as well as safety would be appreciated by most cyclists themselves". However, the idea ran into trenchant opposition from cycling groups, with the CTC distributing pamphlets warning against the threat of cycle paths.

In 1947, in response to official suggestions that cyclists should use cycle-tracks, the CTC adopted a motion expressing determined opposition to cycle paths alongside public roads.

In 2007, official claims of safety for cycle tracks provoked a position paper from the umbrella body for UK cyclists' groups, stating "Cycle Campaign Network knows of no evidence that cycle facilities and in particular cycle lanes, generally lead to safer conditions for cycling". [CCN was subsequently rebranded as Cyclenation.]

In 1996 the UK Cyclists' Touring Club and the Institute of Highways and Transportation jointly produced a set of Cycle-Friendly Infrastructure guidelines that placed segregated cycling facilities at the bottom of the hierarchy of measures designed to promote cycling.

Britain’s second biggest cycle campaign group, the London Cycling Campaign, has likewise never shown any serious interest in the Dutch example and remains fundamentally wedded to vehicular cycling.

When Transport for London says that segregation has never been considered for ‘Cycle Superhighways’ because cyclists don’t want to be treated differently to other vehicles it is referring to those who represent cycling as campaign organisations and as activists.

The majority of regular cyclists do not belong to cycling organisations and remain outside the consultative framework, as do the far greater numbers of non-cyclists.

TfL is not professionally interested in non-cyclists and the reasons for their non-cycling, even though these reasons have been repeatedly and comprehensively documented. TfL’s core aim and priority is accommodating motor vehicle flow and parking, to which everything else is subordinate. Within this traffic modelling framework both pedestrians and cyclists are an impediment, since their presence and activity slows down motor vehicles or may deny vehicles street space.

Vehicular cycling campaigning accommodates itself to this traffic model and seeks to humanise it, through such infrastructure as carriageway markings (Advanced Stop Lines and cycle lanes) or speed restrictions. When the CTC talks about ‘Reallocation of carriageway space’ it doesn’t mean banning motor traffic from streets or taking one lane of a multi-lane highway and segregating it for cyclists but rather bus lanes, widened nearside lanes, cycle lanes

The Dutch template simply doesn’t exist for the CTC, since ‘Cycle tracks away from roads’ is a vague term which could cover everything from a Sustrans leisure route to the classic British segregated cycle path, which is usually poorly designed and poorly maintained and a hideous parody of what Dutch cyclists enjoy. British segregated cycling infrastructure is what put me off segregation, until I learned that there are other kinds.

In the CTC’s ‘Hierarchy of Provision’ there is nothing remotely Dutch about ‘Conversion of footways/footpaths to shared use cycle tracks for pedestrians and cyclists’. Although it piously talks about ‘Traffic reduction’ as the top priority, these vehicular cycling strategies in the ‘Hierarchy of Provision’ in fact do everything to accommodate traffic. The fact that the CTC even considers rubbish, failed infrastructure like the conversion of footways for shared use is very revealing, since this is a favourite device of highway engineers who want to get rid of cyclists from the road.

Because it accepts that the cyclist’s place is among motor vehicles, vehicular cycling campaigners do not seriously seek to challenge the hegemony of the car. There’s a revealing moment in a paper by John Franklin where he writes:

widening the nearside lane on multi-lane roads can be a very useful way of giving cyclists extra space without imposing the constraints of a cycle lane or disadvantaging anyone.

I take him to mean without disadvantaging motorists.

And once you collude with a car-centric infrastructure you end up with cycling infrastructure and campaigning like this.





2. UK cycle campaigning: still in denial


A British cycling activist named Jonathan Wood has written

When we mix in cycle campaigning circles, the demographic of white elderly eccentric men does little to build confidence in the future health of cycling advocacy.

I’m inclined to agree. What I would call establishment cycle campaigning (the CTC, the LCC, Sustrans, Cyclenation) is dominated by a handful of middle-aged or elderly men, some of whom seem to have been around forever. To some extent this is also true of local cycle campaign groups, which quite often boil down to half a dozen activists, who may have been campaigning for 20 years or more. But the problem is not so much the demographic, which is perhaps inevitable within the narrow context of British cycling, but the ideology and the strategy. Ultimately it’s the intellectual eccentricity, the parochialism and the denial of failure expressed by the ideology and strategy that matters most. Outfits like the CTC, Cyclenation and the LCC do bear all the sociological hallmarks of a sect.

The orthodox British cycle campaign ideology is one of seeking small improvements for existing cyclists within a vehicular cycling environment and the strategy is both one of negotiation with decision makers and attempting to encourage non-cyclists to take up cycling through ‘soft’ measures like marketing and cycle training.

Whatever you might think about the merits of this ideology and this strategy, they have signally failed. Cycling in Britain has contracted massively over the past 60 years. In most places it is flatlining or stagnating. The brutal reality is that cycling as modal share is on a steady downward pattern.
Much UK cycle campaigning remains in denial about this, still clinging to the endlessly reiterated belief that a great cycling renaissance is just around the corner.

The optimism can at times be mind-boggling. For example, one delegate reports back from the recent cycling conference in Edinburgh that there was a definite sense that more and stronger investment in cycling lies just around the corner. Which is quite remarkable bearing in mind that the government has just slashed funding for cycling in Britain from about £1 per person to just 20p per person (In a city of 100000 people, it's 20000 pounds. That's not even enough to employ someone to think about doing something… By way of contrast, cycling in the Netherlands is funded at a rate of around 30 euros per person per year, which is about 150 times as much).

And when the new CEO of the London Cycling Campaign is reported as telling delegates that Cycling has come onto the political agenda, and is backed in high places I can’t help wondering who he means. Perhaps the new Road Safety minister? The Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond MP? Possibly the Mayor of London? Or maybe the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government? As for the LCC’s eagerly anticipated administration under a cycling Prime Minister…

But leaving such trifles to one side, what of the places where cycling really is experiencing growth? Take London, which is being hyped as the great success story:

why has the increase taken place? Officially, it is because of the efforts of Transport for London and the London Boroughs (mainly funded by TfL). But there is a more likely reason for at least a large proportion of the increase.

It is one which occurs in road safety and elsewhere where professionals claim credit for changes. Known as “regression-to-mean”, it refers to a change which was due to happen anyway. With cycling modal share, we can point to a typical “underlying average” in northern European cities, including those which have not supported cycling, of some 5%. What has happened in London can at least largely be explained by a spontaneous return to this average.

a large part of the increase in cycling can be seen as spontaneous and not due to official agencies like TfL and London’s Boroughs.

But what if this is true not simply for London but also for the whole of the UK? However unpalatable this might seem, it would suggest that all the efforts of the nation’s cycle campaigners have been in vain. Where there has been a rise in cycling it owes very little to their efforts but would have happened anyway.

In any case, nowhere in Britain has achieved a significant increase in cycling’s modal share. In most British cities modal share languishes at two per cent or less.

The current campaign strategy of organisations like the CTC and the LCC is to argue that cycling is experiencing growth, that more cyclists leads to ‘safety in numbers’, and that in this environment a critical mass will be achieved which will lead to urban planners embracing the bicycle and making British cities just like Copenhagen. But in those rare places which traditionally have had a much bigger modal share (York, for example) there are no signs at all of an already existing critical mass leading to anything other than stagnation or even decline. In 1995 the CTC was quoting a modal share figure for York of 18%, today it is 12%.

But what of Scotland’s most successful cycling city, Edinburgh? At a cycling conference back in 2001 high profile campaigner Don Mathew enthused the delegates with the message “Go for growth”:

The perpetual question asked by policy makers tends to be - 'Can we increase levels of cycling?' The answer from VeloCity is 'Yes - and in widely different circumstances'. Here are some examples:

Glasgow: just starting, but journey to work already up from 0.8% to 2.5%

Edinburgh: 1980s modal share 1.9%, 1990s 3.1% (2010 target 10%)

And now see what happened:

The modal split for Glasgow is 46 percent private cars (drivers and passengers); 25 percent public transport; 18 percent pedestrians; 9 percent rail; 1 percent cycling; and 2 percent other means of transport. Although according to another source Fewer than 1% of journeys in Glasgow are made by bike

Which is hardly surprising when you read this and this (do read the comments).

But Edinburgh is the great success story. It’s the most successful cycling city in Scotland! So was that thrilling target of 10% modal share by 2010 achieved? Er, no.

Edinburgh has a modal share of 6% compared with 2% for the rest of Scotland

But the term ‘modal share’ is here used very loosely and actually only refers to commuter cycling, which always provides the highest figure. Vehicular cycling campaigners love commuter cycling figures both because they are always the most frabjous of all modal share statistics and because they are themselves, as likely as not, commuter cyclists. But as Mikael cruelly and accurately points out the voices who speak for this form of advocacy are largely sub-cultural.

In reality, for Edinburgh, for ‘Travel as a main mode’ the figures for cycling were 2 per cent in the years 2001-2006, dropping to 1.6 per cent for 2007-2008. A slump which matches that in some parts of London:

Weekday trips per day by London residents of Outer London, by main mode.
Mode share percentage: cycling at 1.5 per cent in 1991 and at 1.4 per cent in 2007/8.

None of this sounds like health or growth to me. But not to worry. Edinburgh has signed up to the Brussels Charter target of 15% cycling share by 2020.

Having examined Edinburgh’s plans for ‘encouraging cycling’ I can confidently predict this target will not be reached. And when it isn’t reached in 2020 it will promptly be forgotten and a thrilling new target will be established for 2030, or whenever.

Cycling isn’t going anywhere in York or Edinburgh or London or anywhere else – except among that relatively tiny percentage of the population which can be persuaded to dress in luminous yellow, put on a cycle helmet, and pedal among high volumes of motor traffic or on roads where significant numbers of drivers are behaving in a careless or reckless way. The demographic indicates that the people prepared to do this are largely male and aged 25-45. The majority will be commuters.

For the non-cycling mass of the population

the thing that stops people from cycling is that they don’t want to ride on busy roads, full of motorised traffic that is going too fast and thinks it’s got the right of way and squeezes them. That’s the reason people don’t cycle.

The orthodox response of British cycling campaigners is to dismiss this out of hand. If people are afraid to cycle they must be persuaded otherwise. Cycling is safe and can be proved to be safe with statistics. Moreover, vehicular cycling campaigners are prepared to cycle in traffic and see no reason why everyone else shouldn’t too. You can cycle for 18,000 years before you get killed by a motorist, they say with an encouraging smile. Having dealt with the fears of non-cyclists scientifically, novices can then be trained to adapt to a mass motorized cycling environment through cycle training. Alternatively, non-cyclists can be derided. Their excuses are bogus. People who won’t cycle are lazy. They are a lost cause. So it’s time to tighten those helmet straps, put on the high-viz jacket, and head off down to the howling traffic on the dual carriageway to assert ‘the right to ride’.

But of course the other side of people’s reluctance to cycle in traffic is their desire to cycle on infrastructure which lacks motor vehicles.

concerns about the safety of cycling appeared to be an issue for a large number of potential cyclists. Of those who were able to cycle, a clear majority agreed that they would ‘find cycling on the roads stressful’ (63%) and that it was ‘too dangerous to cycle on the roads’ (60%) and that they ‘would cycle (more) if there were more dedicated cycle paths’ (52%).

The last, desperate prejudice of the opinionated vehicular cyclist is that there simply isn’t space on British roads for Dutch infrastructure, which is just another lazy myth.

Any British cyclist with eyes to see can find their own examples of where segregated cycle paths are possible in urban environments.

And as David Arditti has observed

The big thing that tends not to be understood in the UK about segregated cycle lanes, Dutch-style, is that their main purpose is not safety, per se, as cycling is inherently quite safe anyway, it is the prioritisation of space for cycle traffic. It is, in other words, to give the bike a competitive advantage in the struggle for space on the roads, which makes bike journeys quicker and more efficient, as well as more pleasant. There is no other effective method of preventing parking, loading, queuing, bus and taxi stopping in cycle space, and general obstruction by motor vehicles, other than physical segregation. This is why it is used so extensively on the continent. It is not that the continentals have some malign control agenda to push cyclists off the general roads.




3. ‘Splitters!’

For at least a decade there seem to have been people on the fringes of the cycling community who have pushed for Dutch cycling infrastructure as the way forward, but they have evidently always been in a small minority, with the vehicular cycling campaign majority subscribing to views like this.

But as cycling in Britain continues to languish, and as UK cycle campaign organisations and groups continue to remain in denial about their own catastrophic campaign failures, new voices of dissent are being raised.

The medium of liberation is, of course, the internet and the blog. Anyone can now set up a blog, talk about their cycling experiences, post photographs, and express opinions. The stranglehold which the CTC and the LCC have traditionally had over communication (magazines) has been loosened. And, as with the invention of printing, new ideas and new thinking proliferate in a democratic new medium to challenge the traditionalists, who in turn are quick to sniff out heresy. (Oddly enough even in the sixteenth century the English reformation was ignited by ideas in large part spread from the Netherlands, by the incendiary new medium of the printed book and pamphlet.)

I was intrigued by this comment from Carlton Reid:

when certain bloggers - Freewheeler springs to mind, and others are quite close to his/her position - accuse those organisations, and myself, of being guilty of 'crimes against cycling' there's too much Judean Peoples' Front for my liking. Splitters!

In fact the person who made that accusation was not me, though I quite like the idea of prosecution – I wish to indict Sustrans and the London Cycling Campaign for fraudulent misrepresentation by including shiny photographs of people cycling in Hyde Park in their collaborative document Delivering the benefits of cycling in Outer London. Because what does off-road cycling in an inner London royal park have to do with cycling in Outer London?

Why does a document purporting to be about Outer London contain no photographs of what cycling conditions are actually like in Outer London? And why, on another occasion, when it does bother to cast its eyes on the London Borough of Waltham Forest, does Sustrans describe a cycle lane like this (below) on High Road Leytonstone as ‘cycling friendly’?


























London is itself a crime against cycling - or at least it was to this visitor from the Netherlands:

I tried London 2 years ago, got pretty annoyed by traffic & the lack of real provisions for people on bikes… I thought it was just criminal how much space a dense city like London allowed for cars and how marginalized it is for people on bikes

To return to Carlton Reid’s comment, it was this blogger who uttered those words to which he takes exception – a cycling philosopher and sociologist who goes beyond the great segregation debate to address another core failing of conventional UK cycle campaigning:

I would say we’re committing a crime against cycling when people continuously talk about promoting cycling without talking about deterring driving. Because that’s what’s actually happening. We’ve got a cycling promotion industry in the UK which refuses to contemplate the act of deterring driving. It’s always promoting cycling around the edges, not seeking to dismantle the central system of mobility in the UK, which is the car.Everyone is still addicted to their cars, and if you just muck around with the edges of the transport system, you’re not actually going to achieve modal shift. If you’re saying you want to double cycling, you’re talking about modal shift. You’re not saying you want someone to ride a bike twice more each year when the sun is shining and they want to have a day out. You want people to ride bikes day in, day out, and you don’t do that by mucking around with the edges and not doing anything fundamental. Everyone who’s passionate about cycling knows that, but I get really frustrated when I see people who have got some ability to challenge a little bit more radically through their positions and just not doing it.

This seems to me true. UK cycle campaigning is a hurricane of activity but it often seems parochial, collaborationist or comically futile. It evades both its own historic failures and declines to engage with traffic modelling or the hegemony of the car. My heart sinks when I read about cycle campaigning like this:

We were recently invited to take part in a focus group to discuss polite cycling. At the invitation of the City Council's Sustainable Transport Officer, we attended a meeting along with Police, community wardens, SUSTRANS, CTC and Officers from neighbouring authorities. The purpose was to discuss the issues around the minority of cyclists who could be encouraged to behave in a more considerate manner

The ‘splitters’ that Carlton Reid has in mind are presumably those bloggers who prefer the Dutch template to British vehicular cycling, and whose influence is beginning to spread.

Very well, say the angry, trembling vehiculars. What would you do?

Calling Dave Horton a splitter might be accurate in the sense that he is a critic of orthodox cycle campaigning but is a little unfair in the sense that he isn’t doing anything to challenge it, because he is.

Elsewhere, and out of the ‘splitter’ blogging community, has arisen the new Cycling Embassy, which has a Mission Statement and a Manifesto.

The Cycling Embassy holds out the promise of a new vision for cycling which is very different to the traditional one. And I suspect when all the ideas have been shared and thrashed out they’ll boil down to this: I want what he’s got.




4. Strategy

Having a vision is one thing, putting it into practice is quite another. The strategy of traditional UK cycle campaigning is one of negotiation with decision makers, which is obviously basic to any social transformation in a society like the UK.

The problem with traditional campaigning is that it is basically collaborative rather than oppositional. The LCC and Sustrans are happy to collaborate with Transport for London in ‘encouraging cycling’ without ever facing up to the fact that TfL is first and foremost concerned with motor vehicle flow and parking and that this transport modelling is by definition antagonistic to cycling.

Except of course it isn’t if you believe in vehicular cycling. The massive growth in car ownership and use becomes irrelevant if you subscribe to more-niceness-among-road-users and ‘share the road’. If you believe in sharing the road you then start fretting about the image of cycling and trying to ‘win respect’ from motorists.

Whether or not the CTC and the LCC can be won round to a new way of thinking I don’t know. When I went on the Redbridge Skyride and went up to the CTC stall I was interested to discover that the organisation is trying to sell itself as a family-friendly cycling organisation which is just right for Skyride cyclists. A contradiction there, perhaps. I am a bit more optimistic where the LCC is concerned. I think Jim is right when he says There’s massive pent up segregationalism out there and 99.9% of them don’t even know it.

I think Roger Geffen’s presentation at the last Cyclenation conference was a tacit acknowledgement that there’s a wind of change blowing through British cycle campaigning (which the orthodox cycling establishment is naturally anxious to close the door on and suppress). And as Jim also notes, Cycling Embassy of Denmark and Fietsberaad are practically ignored by campaign organisations over here which is insane.

What’s even worse is the defeatism embedded in orthodox cycle campaign organisations. Whenever anyone has raised the subject of segregation they have been curtly brushed aside on the grounds that such a demand is unrealistic, impossible, a pipe dream. There is no desire even to ask. But as has been pointed out

Most car users are not political Motorists: they want nice livable streets too. They’ve let pedestrian zones and residential road blocks and people-friendly developments happen, and I’ve seen no evidence that they wouldn’t also let bike paths happen. It is not car users who have been vetoing the development of good bike paths.

As long as Britain’s cycling organisations and local groups remain wedded to vehicular cycling they will continue to be an obstacle to mass cycling, not enablers. This obviously presents problems for any new groups of activists with alternative visions. Here in Waltham Forest, for example, it is difficult to persuade councillors that what’s needed here is a segregated Dutch-style cycle path when on the one hand local shopkeepers believe their livelihood depends on shoppers arrriving by car, and on the other hand the local branch of the London Cycling Campaign gives the enthusiastic thumbs up to a cycle lane like this as the kind of infrastructure which is best practice:



























It’s worth bearing in mind that the genuine cycling revolutions in the Netherlands and Dednmark didn’t just emerge from the kindness of traffic planners. They emerged from various kinds of struggle.

In the Netherlands, as Maarten Sneep points out,

At the start of the 70s the bicycle dropped off the radar of the ANWB. At the end of the decade angry cyclists decided that their voice needed to be heard. They started with the 'ENWB' (echte nederlandse wielrijders bond - Real Dutch Cyclists Union). The ANWB promptly sued over the name (and won), giving the new Dutch cyclists union (renamed to Fietsersbond) an amount of media attention they never could have generated on their own at the time.
(see the comments here)

Apart from dissension within the Dutch cycling community, the movement for better cycling conditions was also driven forwards by making it an issue of child safety.

In Denmark the cycling community's resistance was more confrontational:

In the 1970s, as cars got cheaper and the roads widened the bike lanes were going to be bulldozed. This was when the cyclists took to the streets marching, lobbying and yes, even burning cars.

I am not suggesting arson as the route to mass cycling but I do think that cyclists need to consider challenging the status quo in other ways than tea and biscuits at the Town Hall. Let me return to Jonathan Wood, who was enthused by his attendance at a Manchester critical mass:

Its great benefit is that it breeds cycling radicals and activists. It constitutes the opposite end of the spectrum of activism to the cycle campaigners who do the proxy work of the Institute of Advanced Motorists in their ‘Stop at Red’ campaigns. Whilst beyond the scope of this piece, I think the latter campaigning constitutes supplication; no movement for social change in history has ever achieved change by trying to make itself likeable.

Non-violent direct action stunts are long overdue in British cycle campaigning. Twenty activists sealing off one lane of a multi-lane urban highway for the benefit of cyclists – that kind of thing. Ad hoc segregation on the Euston Road, a six lane motor-vehicle choked hellhole where air pollution levels are very high and where there isn’t even a crap cycle lane. Spontaneous guerrilla actions! Protests connected to very specific aims (we want Dutch infrastructure here). The press would love it. The majority of people travelling in central London are not in cars, so why are people who choose to drive down Regent Street allowed to do so? Block off Regent Street! Reclaim it for cyclists and pedestrians!

As for the notion of splitters… Like the man said

There is a crack, a crack, in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

The religion of vehicular cycling needs a lot more apostates.

What won’t bring about mass cycling (4) Cycle training

Cycle training will help you to adjust to this…

If you want to understand all that’s rotten in the state of establishment British cycle campaigning, look no further then this document.

It acknowledges the fundamental reason why most of the population has no interest in cycling:

Fear of traffic and feelings of vulnerability

And then it offers solutions, of which the primary one is

Targeted cyclist training

In other words, its solution to people’s reluctance to cycle among motor vehicles is to treat this as a personal behavioural problem, not as one of infrastructure or the street environment or a mass motorized transport culture.

If you are afraid of cycling amid high volumes of motor traffic or if you feel vulnerable in an environment filled with people operating dangerous machinery in a criminally negligent way, then it’s YOU who is the problem. Your fears must be addressed in two ways.

Firstly, you must be persuaded that your perceptions are false and that cycling in what you regard as a hostile and dangerous environment is actually perfectly safe.

Secondly, you must be taught how, as a cyclist, to adapt your behaviour to this environment. You must be trained.

'Cyclists fare best when they are recognised to be and act as the operators of vehicles' is a universal maxim, perhaps best expressed in the Stationary Office cycling manual 'Cyclecraft' written by John Franklin. Central to the 'vehicular cycling' approach are the principles of assertive and defensive cycling.

I find the concept of ‘defensive cycling’ quite an interesting one, because it tacitly accepts that there is an offensive going on. And cycle training is basically all about accommodating yourself to the mass-motorized battlefield.

In itself ‘Cyclecraft’ makes sense for hardcore vehicular cyclists. It’s all about minimising risk to yourself by making your presence very visible to motorists, by occupying the centre of the carriageway when appropriate (for example, when approaching a pinchpoint), and by being assertive, confident and giving clear hand signals. ‘Cyclecraft’ advice includes stuff like this:

Multi-lane manoeuvres (such as to turn right off a dual carriageway) are generally regarded as some of the more difficult ones for a cyclist to make. In fact, cyclists can make such manoeuvres without great difficulty, but to do so requires knowledge of the appropriate vehicular cycling technique.

It doesn’t just require cycling technique, however. It also requires nerves of steel. It also doesn’t work if the volume of traffic is high and vehicles are bunched close together and travelling that much faster than you are – a not uncommon phenomenon on ‘A’ roads. And these days you will see very, very few cyclists on British dual carriageways or out-of-town ‘A’ roads, for the very good reason that they are terrifying and very unpleasant places to cycle. The same applies to rural roads. And assertive cycling quite often leads to the blowing of a car horn or the screaming of obscenities by motorized terrorists who resent being held up even for a few seconds by a cyclist or a group of cyclists.

Proponents of defensive cycling breezily assert that If you ride confidently, obey the rules, wear visible clothing and control your space you shouldn’t have any problems. And there is no shortage of people urging people to realize that cycling is safe and to get their children cycling to school.

But this depends on what kind of environment you cycle in, and for most towns and cities in Britain this is sheer fantasy. It’s even worse in the USA. It’s a bleak irony that one fervent proponent of the thesis that The belief that cycling in traffic is dangerous is widespread but cannot be supported through accident and fatality statistics was subsequently run down and killed by a drunk driver.

More cyclists on roads shared with reckless drivers does not necessarily lead to ‘safety in numbers’. Indeed, The most recent Department for Transport (DfT) statistics show that the number of those hurt, as a proportion of total miles cycled, went up by 1 per cent between 2008 and 2009.

Almost all cycling bloggers report unhappy interactions with motorists. Cycling bloggers as diverse as Rob Ainsley and Martin Porter scrupulously obey the rules, but still report having very bad experiences. Fairly regularly. And the more you cycle, the more you are exposed to risk, and the more likely you are to have these unpleasant experiences. YouTube is crammed with videos like this one:











Once you start insisting on cyclists wearing ‘visible clothing’ (sic) your argument then starts to blur with the bogus, blood-drenched ideology of ‘road safety’, which puts all the emphasis on the victim and diverts attention from the source of the danger. And in a sense ‘Cyclecraft’ and ‘road safety’ have a lot in common in so far as they accept the transport status quo and demand that cyclists adjust to it. And of course when the roads are full of drivers who are using mobile phones, or glancing at paperwork, or are otherwise distracted, it makes sense to wear reflective yellow or a brightly coloured cycle helmet. And once you start NOT conforming to car-centric values and rules, then you, the cyclist, become the problem.

Cyclists who jump red lights annoy drivers and give us all a bad name. Obey traffic signals, they’re the law and you’re subject to the law.

But of course red light jumping is simply the expression of what might be called a massive culture of unofficial cyclecraft, which includes things like cycling on the footway or riding up one-way streets the ‘wrong’ way. The vast majority of cyclists are not members of cycling organisations and almost certainly have little interest in, or knowledge of, the politics of cycling or the debates which rage on blogs or cycling threads. Ordinary cyclists just get on with it, in their own way. They have no mission, other than their own safety and convenience, which they work out on their own terms. The reality might be deplorable but I would argue that this is a response to a vehicular cycling infrastructure which they perceive as slowing them down or as dangerous.

The transport status quo is all about accommodating, managing and prioritizing motor vehicle flow. Establishment British cycle campaigning is basically about seeking to ameliorate conditions for vehicular cyclists within this framework. But many cyclists disobey this status quo for two reasons. The first one is safety. Some cyclists perceive themselves to be safer riding along the footway. It may also be safer to jump a red light, no matter how much this scandalizes cycling campaigners. The second one is convenience. The transport status quo is indifferent to the convenience of cyclists, so cyclists adapt accordingly, finding their own unofficial desire lines.

John Franklin doesn’t see it like that. Instead he argues that

In recent years, the deliberate disobeying of red lights and other controls has much increased – all practices that are consistent with the changing perception of cycling to a non-vehicular activity.

Similarly, he thinks people cycle on pavements because they have been corrupted by ‘shared use’ off-road cycling infrastructure. Franklin argues:

Most of the pavement cycling I see is alongside roads with sufficiently little traffic to pose no realistic difficulty to anyone.

The problem with that kind of attitude is that John Franklin’s 'realism' is not shared by other people. And in fact a road used by few drivers can be far more frightening and dangerous than one which is full of motor vehicles. Where there are few other drivers and the road is empty, there’s much more of a temptation to speed. Traffic congestion and crawling motor vehicles make for safer cycling – but not necessarily enjoyable cycling.

The reality, I suggest, is quite the opposite of Franklin’s interpretation. The rise in the kind of rule-breaking cycling behaviour described is consistent with a huge rise in vehicle ownership and use. Franklin is keen to blame the temptations of off-road infrastructure for this bad behaviour, but this is simply him imposing his prejudice against segregated cycling onto reality. He’s seeing things through the wrong end of the telescope. The behaviour he deplores is precisely a response to the atrocious conditions which the ‘vehicular cycling’ ideology has bequeathed cyclists in what is now one of the most backward and stagnant cycling nations in Europe.

Cyclists respond through their behaviour to the inconvenience and danger inherent in a car-centric and heavily motorized road network. If you expect people to cycle but don’t provide them with a safe or convenient infrastructure they will adapt their behaviour accordingly.

Trying to sell cycling as an attractive travel mode is negated both by the personal experience of non-cyclists – they can see at a glance that the roads are filled both with big intimidating vehicles like lorries and with drivers behaving recklessly – and by perceptions of cyclists as people who need to dress up in safety gear and wear a safety helmet.

It is all very well talking about a ‘culture of fear’ but many cyclists are afraid and I think they are right to be. No matter how logical the arguments against cycle helmets may seem to a cycling campaigner, huge numbers of riders still prefer to use them. It is perfectly true that cycle helmet campaigns possess an evangelical incoherence but so does ‘road safety’ and ‘vehicular cycling’. Insisting that cycling is not dangerous is not fundamentally different to insisting that a cycle helmet will protect you from the consequences of a traffic collision. If it isn’t dangerous then why is ‘defensive cycling’ at the heart of vehicular cycling campaigning? Here in London any person in their right minds would perceive Vauxhall gyratory as dangerous for cyclists. Or the Tottenham Hale gyratory. Or the Aldwych gyratory. Or Marble Arch. And all the cycle training in the world isn’t going to get the masses using them. Nor is advice like If it’s rush hour and it’s a major roundabout just get off your bike and walk across it. That negates the whole point of urban cycling – maneuverability and speed.

Trying to sell cycling as something which can be rendered agreeable by battlefield training and a uniform seems to me a non-starter. But the problem isn’t one of marketing, it’s one of product. You can devote huge sums to advertising a product, and you may get lots of people to try it once, but if the product is crap – or at least if it is perceived as dangerous or inconvenient and unenjoyable - they won’t buy it again. The recent DfT report revealing that two out of three drivers who gave up the car for cycling subsequently reverted to their cars was very revealing. Other local studies from around Britain indicate that when you can effect a small modal shift away from the car, drivers switch to public transport, not cycling.

Cycle training is important to British cycle campaigning because it is a vehicular cycling strategy. If you don’t agree with segregation, then this is what you are left with – adapting cycling behaviour to the status quo. And as a campaign strategy it has blatantly and dismally failed. Over the past decade the ambitious targets for modal share which were established at the start of the century in towns and cities across Britain (“Go for growth!”) have crumbled to dust. The response of the cycle campaign establishment is, as always, one of complete amnesia, icy silence and… fabulous, exciting and yet more utterly unrealistic new targets for 2020 or 2025. For establishment cycle campaigners, Britain is forever on the edge of a cycling renaissance. No one is more in denial than a conventional cycling campaigner.

*

The centrality of ‘cycle training’ as the panacea for non-cyclist’s fears is rooted in the prevailing ideology of British cycle campaigners. But the dark side of cycle training is that it has become a substitute for safe, convenient, segregated cycling infrastructure on the Dutch model – the one cycling strategy with a proven record of spectacular success.

It’s no coincidence that two of the leading opponents of segregated cycling infrastructure are also the authors of the two leading books on how to cope in modern urban traffic, i.e. John Forester in the USA (whose book Effective Cycling was first published in 1984) and John Franklin in the UK (whose book Cyclecraft first appeared in 1988).

Franklin’s hostility to off-road infrastructure is rooted in the notion that it’s dangerous and has a high casualty rate which often goes unrecorded. He also argues that such infrastructure slows cyclists down:

Efficient and speedy cycling is important if cycling is to compete as a mode of transport with the car. Road-side paths of almost any kind prevent this and make cycling slow and dangerous.

That’s certainly true of most British cycle paths. It’s utterly untrue of cycle paths in the Netherlands, however, which are not slow.

Franklin asserts:

Recent research in Europe and America suggests strongly that the greatest influence on cycling safety is the number of cyclists, not infrastructure. Better safety comes from more cycling, not the other way about, nor is safety in any way improved by moving away from a vehicular basis.

It’s as if the Netherlands doesn’t exist.

Except that it does for Franklin, in this form:

Bicycle facilities of the Netherlands

Safety problems of two-way cycle tracks at junctions almost insuperable

This turns out to be a claim made at a Dutch transport conference 34 years ago, at a time when the Netherlands was just about to start reversing its car dependency. And yet people still triumphantly quote Franklin’s collection of yellowing, out-of-date material on cycling threads and in comments boxes.

In reality nowadays

Dutch cyclists are not only the safest in the world, but also the Dutch cycle more than people of any other nation. Almost the whole population (93%) rides a bike at least once a week. Every type of person cycles. The infrastructure is the reason why.

Got that? The Netherlands offers an experience which is more or less impossible in any British town and city, like, say, an unbroken 10 minutes of cycling.

To any Dutch person it would seem a very quaint idea that you needed to read a book about ‘cyclecraft’ and be trained in ‘defensive cycling’ before you could ride a bike. But then Dutch cyclists are visibly relaxed, don’t feel the need to wear special equipment, and do things which would be regarded as seriously anti-social in Britain. They ride two-to-a-bike. They ride side by side. (I was once cycling alongside a friend in Hackney when a police car cut us up, braked, and a furious police officer sprang out and screamed that we were slowing down the traffic and that I would be arrested if I didn’t cycle in single file.)

You only have to look at the faces of cyclists in London to see that a lot of the time it’s not fun but stressful. You can’t relax, ever. You have to be permanently on your guard. You have to watch out for drivers. It’s true: you have to cycle defensively.

There’s a throwaway remark by Carlton Reid which I find very revealing. He says a mass cycling culture doesn't require enjoyment, it just requires lots of people cycling.

I think he’s wrong. I think cyclists in Denmark and the Netherlands find it enjoyable. And if cycling isn’t enjoyable you aren’t ever going to get a mass cycling culture.

But even if he’s right

Mass bicycle use, if it were ever to be achieved without any changes to the roads, would likely make little improvement to the quality of our environs. They would still be smelly, smoggy, noisy, nasty stressful places.

Which is why the reallocation of road space away from cars is at the heart of humanizing our towns and cities, and making them more attractive for walking, cycling and living. And historically the Dutch started out on that path by firstly creating segregated bike grids on major routes in towns and cities. They made cycling attractive, convenient, safe and enjoyable. That was how the Dutch cycling revolution started and how car dependency began to be reversed.

John Franklin has always been a major obstacle to such a reallocation of street space by virtue of his fervent promotion of vehicular cycling and antipathy to off-road cycling. Back in 1998 he wrote a shit-stirring open letter to John Grimshaw of Sustrans, objecting to that organisation’s commitment to off-road cycling infrastructure:

I have noticed a considerable maturing of the views of cycle campaigners in recent years based, no doubt, on experience in the real world. With this has come increased recognition of the limitations of cycle facilities and of the need to integrate rather than segregate cyclists in traffic. I was delighted only a few weeks ago to learn that one CCN group, whom I had given up as a lost cause in terms of cycling policy, has by its own admission made a U-turn away from segregation and in favour of a minimum facilities approach. I sense that Sustrans is becoming more and more isolated in the direction it is taking, and that this will lead to increased friction at both national and local levels. There is already a feeling in many places that Sustrans too often runs rough-shod over the views of local cyclists. Is it really in the best interests of any of us for this to continue?

I am copying this letter to the CTC, and I will circulate it within CCN and to other parties, as I feel it important for these matters to be considered as widely as possible.

Sustrans was not accountable to Franklin and his associates or to British cycling organisations and therefore survived his discontent, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a supposedly professional organisation with Franklin at its heart should still be issuing the cycling world's tepid equivalent of a fatwa. That the guardians of vehicular cycle campaigning feel rattled by a pro-Dutch blog like this one is curiously revelatory. (And just for the record this blog had never had a word to say about the policies of Cyclenation prior to its bizarre and inaccurate – and since modified and toned-down - ‘national statement’. I didn't even know that Cyclenation had a cycling policy, since I understood it to be a company that facilitated cycling conferences. Which as far as I can tell is basically what it is. But the heartwarming upside of being denounced by Cyclenation is a surge in this blog's readership and an increase in its listed Followers.)

Franklin’s diatribe against Sustrans provoked a retort from Paul Gannon of the Camden cycling campaign, who argued that Franklin demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of cycling in the Netherlands.

Before long Franklin was in Camden, insisting among other things that

segregation is in itself unsafe;

segregation doesn't make for more cyclists

Franklin seems on the face of it to have won. Thereafter Paul Gannon appears to vanish from the world of cycle campaigning. Today the Camden group unequivocally states We are involved in campaigns for better on-road cycle routes. (How successful this has been remains problematic.) Until very recently segregation seemed to vanish from overt debate within the world of cycle campaigning. The last reference I can find to it online is back in 2003 when Christian Woolmar (another major player in the world of cycle campaigning) informed delegates at a conference:

Many cyclists are wrong to argue for totally segregated facilities. They won’t happen.

Franklin, in the interim, went from strength to strength. If you look at Cyclenation conference presentations dating back to 2001 you’ll see that John Franklin pops up five times, in 2009 (twice), 2007, 2004 and 2001, more than any other listed speaker. (Naturally there is not a single speaker listed during the first decade of the twenty-first century talking about cycling in Denmark or the Netherlands; the British cycle campaign establishment remains fundamentally parochial.) Today John Franklin is a revered figure, although to me he’s probably the individual who, across the broad field of cycle campaigning, has personally done the most to damage the cause of mass cycling in Britain. And today (to revert to where this post first started) even Sustrans now lends its name to on-road cycle campaigning. Franklin's rout of the opposition is nothing if not impressive.

But leaving aside the demonstrable failure of the vehicular cycling strategies which have been at the heart of cycle campaigning in Britain over the past decades, there is one final irony. The proponents of cycle training patronisingly tell non-cyclists to overcome their fears and get some cycle training, but they are personally unwilling to come to terms with their own basic anxiety. This was articulated as long ago as 1937 by the CTC:

A great deal of the cycle-path propaganda is based on a desire to remove cyclists from the roads. That is why the request for cycle paths is so often accompanied by a suggestion that their use should be enforced by law. Therein lies a serious threat to cycling.

(cited here)

The problem is that by shunning Dutch-style cycle paths and dogmatically defending the right to ride on 'A' roads, establishment cycle campaigning has left us with the worst of both worlds. Cycling has massively contracted and only the most diehard rider wants to cycle on roads like the A1 or the A3 or the A11 or the A12. Meanwhile where segregated infrastructure does exist in the UK it is notoriously mediocre and bears no resemblance to Dutch infrastructure at all. The CTC opposed segregated cycle paths but it passionately embraced motorways. That would get drivers off main roads and leave them clear for cyclists. And didn’t that idea work out well…

As far as the Netherlands are concerned, here are some examples of cyclepaths alongside roads where you're not allowed to cycle: first example; second example; third example. But who would want to cycle on roads like those when you have a safe, good quality cycle path?

As for Britain. Cycle training first started in 1947. Around the time that cycling in Britain peaked and then began its historic decline. So if anything, cycle training is historically associated with contraction and decline, not growth.

(Below) Defective cyclecraft on the Aldwych gyratory. Clear hand signals and they’ve ‘taken the road’. But foolishly they’ve forgotten their 'visible clothing'.

Cycle Alienation

Come on in, the water’s lovely…

An internationally-acclaimed blog such as this one (we are big in Alaska) is naturally a bit reluctant to provide the oxygen of publicity to attention-seeking British fundamentalists, but I suppose I should respond to this.

I must admit at first I was surprised and a bit bemused. This blog has never had anything at all to say about Cyclenation as an organisation or its official philosophy of cycling or any of its staff or any of the cycling groups which are linked to it.

What this ‘official statement’ actually boils down to is a hissy fit by Simon Geller, who is Secretary and Communications Director of Cyclenation. In the first place this statement seems to me inappropriate for an organisation which represents itself as a professional organisation. Members of the local cycling groups which are affiliated to it can read the archives of this blog and decide for themselves whether it is fixated on Cyclenation. In over 4,000 posts the word ‘Cyclenation’ has appeared just twice. Secondly, it is a bit rich of Geller to attack this blog for its no comments policy when he himself attacks me on his own no comments blog, on the website of the Sheffield cycling campaign which allows me no right of reply, and in an ‘official statement’ on behalf of Cyclenation which also allows me no right of reply. This seems to me excessive for an individual whose name has never featured on this blog and of whose existence I was hitherto blissfully unaware.

If Richard Dawkins was invited to address a convention of Jehova’s Witnesses I suspect he’d decline, but even if he didn’t I think we can safely conclude that no minds would be changed by the experience. I therefore see no reason why this blog should be accountable to Simon Geller, though if Cyclenation wants someone to put the case for Dutch cycling infrastructure they could always try asking another vehicular cycling apostate. But if Cyclenation really wants to invigorate traditional British cycle campaigning what the organisation needs is not speakers putting the case for Dutch infrastructure but to actually hold a conference in Utrecht, or Assen, or best of all Groningen.

That this blog is getting under the skin of one or two of the gate keepers of traditional British cycle campaigning is a wondrous thing. Of all the tributes to this blog which have poured in over the past year this is the clear winner:

it's the product of embittered and twisted minds.

Thank you for that tribute. And in the same cheery spirit let this be the song with which Crap Cycling & Walking in Waltham Forest says goodbye to the old year and welcomes in the new.