Urban cycling

Cities should be civilised places but are mostly trashed by cars, and car-based lifestyles that destroy health and fitness. The bicycle is a simple and elegant solution – a vehicle with extraordinary power to do good, including restore civic life, health and fitness. Were cities across the globe to replace cars with bicycles it’d be a giant step towards a fairer, greener and happier planet. Some city authorities are remembering or learning for the first time about the bicycle’s potential, but still too few. Even where urban cycling is encouraged, it’s cycling-to-work initiatives that tends to get prioritised. Cycling to and from work should only account for a small portion of the bicycle’s contribution to urban renaissance – bicycles of different kinds that cater for different abilities could and ought to become the normal way for people of whatever age to make most of their urban journeys. Life, and the world as we know it would be transformed!

Cycling should be encouraged in many different but inter-connected ways. Imagine a cycling system with all components pointing toward cycling and making it easy (much as today a car system makes driving normal). This cycling system is in a nascent stage everywhere and needs to be developed in favour of the (outdated) car system, but this is an ongoing process. People (cyclists and drivers) should be taught how to deal with existing conditions for cyclists, even as those conditions are adapted and gradually revisited for cycling (for example, by making driving slower, more expensive and more difficult). However, for now, a large majority of people simply won’t cycle in the conditions that prevail across most towns and cities. Understandably – they’re scared. So to accelerate the shift from car-oriented to a bicycle-oriented lifestyle, we need to provide high-quality, permanent, dedicated spaces for cycling along large, busy road arteries that, for now, are full of cars, trucks and buses. These roads are important cycling routes but people are afraid to use them.

Yes. The cycling push is coming from the world’s most prestigious cities (Paris, New York and London), which are slowly being re-designed for cycling. But if cycling is to fulfil its democratic potential, there’s the danger that cycling will become easier for rich people in gentrified inner cities that are reinvented around liveability, whilst becoming harder for others – those priced out the city and forced to travel greater distances. If cycling isn’t to become elitist, people need good cycling facilities and skills too! Indeed, training and dedicated spaces for cycling are necessary everywhere; the case for dedicated space has less to do with the degree of urbanism than with specific roads that deter cycling. Trip distances increase in peri-urban and suburban areas. However, as the Netherlands proves, this isn’t fatal to cycling. What is fatal are hostile roads. Outside the city there’s more space to properly cater to cycling on them. As for education, learning about cyclists’ needs should be compulsory in driver training, and learning how to cycle part of every child’s education.