Cycling takes off - or does it?

Well, well, quite suddenly, cycling as transport, plus walking -  ignored  by successive governments for 50 years, paid lip service at best, given buggar all in the last budget -  is now to get £2bn funding, effective immediately.

Cycling transport revolution at last? 

The reason?  The government is rightly very concerned that the economy will collapse because people are too spooked by the Coronavirus pandemic to use public transport to start getting back work. 
Whether it is safe to do so yet is an open question.  The latest advice on how lock down might or might not be eased from Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been criticised as confusing.

However,  they have turned to the humble cycle to save us from ruin.

The basic plan is to put in pop-up bike lanes, widen the pavements, make junctions safer and provide cycle and bus-only corridors. All this within the next few weeks.

Additionally, there will be vouchers issued to help people pay for bike repairs and to provide more “bike fixing facilities”, whatever they may be? Perhaps they will Bicycle Repair People stationed around town.

Better late than never.  But they haven't gone so far as to  say to drivers you should  cycle short distances instead of driving, to save the environment!

For it is common news that many of those who succumb to the virus have underlying  health issues, including respiratory illness, caused by pollution, with traffic one of the biggest contributors to fouling the air we breathe.

Between 7 and 9 million people die globally every year from illnesses caused by pollution and governments really couldn’t care less, counting this as a cost against production.

But since the advent of this plague, governments are waking up not so much to acknowledge that climate change threatens our extinction, but because the poorly regulated growth economics which has contributed to this and which underpins our very way of life -  or death if  you prefer -  has ground to a halt. 

So, on yer bike.

Crucially, though, £2bn on its own will not be enough. Cycling UK say between £5bn and £6bn will need to found over the next five years if the road infrastructure is to made safe for cycling.

It’s a huge undertaking if this is to be done properly.  All those roundabout to be ripped out and rebuilt, all the cycling-specific traffic signals which will need to be installed where cycle lanes cross main roads. All those contra-flow cycle lanes to be installed in those outdated one-way systems, the Bain not just of cyclists, but of drivers, too.

And what about those kerbs rounded off to allow traffic to turn into side roads without slowing, which puts pedestrians and cyclists lives at risk.
Can't see it happening.

I note in the news that the government is to it make it a strategic legal requirement to make changes to the highway – the pop up cycle lanes for instance. Are they talking about the trunk road network and/or the Local Authority road network.

This is important because historically, government, aka the Department for Transport, has only ever had the power to manage the few thousand miles of trunk roads and certainly not the 250,000 miles of the local roads network under Local Authority control.  
As one local councillor explained to me, the mechanics of government do not allow Westminster to tell Local Authorities what to do with roads under LA control.

Which is a pity, because it is these roads which carry the most traffic. I’m not sure what the present stats show, but as I understood it, 71 per cent of all journeys made are five miles or less, many of them suitable for cycling.

So, unless the government has got the LAs by the balls, and can now order them to make the changes necessary, this scheme risks going off at half-cock.  Because the LAs have never been legally bound by DfT decisions which have always been advisory for LA’s to ignore if they so wish and generally do over cycling matters.

With few exceptions, LAs have made a complete mess of any cycle infrastructure they could bother themselves to install, and their engineers have ignored government approved guidelines.

Watch this space.