Active travel
We’ve had the National Bus Strategy and the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail, but they’re not the only modal strategies that the Government has published in the last year.
Before Freewheeling got off the ground, we also had Gear Change, the Government’s strategy for walking and cycling.
Let’s see what it says.
Ambition
This Government cannot be accused of a lack of ambition. Like the bus and rail strategies, the cycling and walking strategy overflows with big vision. The plan promises that:
Places will be truly walkable. A travel revolution in our streets, towns and communities will have made cycling a mass form of transit. Cycling and walking will be the natural first choice for many journeys with half of all journeys in towns and cities being cycled or walked by 2030.
Like the bus and rail strategies, the vision is intelligent and accurate. It talks about the need for segregated cycle lanes, and describes in detail what good looks like. It is explicit about what will and will not be funded; for example, schemes that require cycles and pedestrians to share the same space are out.
There are some truly bold ideas, such as taking certain main roads from suburbs to city centres and making them into bus and cycle-only corridors, with motorists forced to use alternative routes.
To be honest, while it pretends to be a cycling and walking strategy, it absolutely is not. It’s a cycling strategy, pure and simple, and a very good one.
Honest
As with the Williams Review, the cycling strategy is remarkably honest about past failings:
Much cycling infrastructure in this country is inadequate. It reflects a belief, conscious or otherwise, that hardly anyone cycles, that cycling is unimportant and that cycles must take no meaningful space from more important road users, such as motor vehicles and pedestrians. It offers little protection from motor traffic and gives up at the points where any difficulty is faced or inconvenience to motorists is risked. These are often, of course, precisely the places where cycling provision is most needed.
For all of my life, politicians have refused to say boo to the motoring goose (hmmm - not sure that expression quite works, but never mind). It’s great to see both here and in the National Bus Strategy that the DfT is explicitly coming down on the side of the non-car modes.
Opponents
Boris’s foreword is explicit that the opponents make the most noise but are actually in a minority. Talking about building bike lanes in London, he says:
It was often difficult and we faced opposition. But when the results of consultations and opinion polls came back, our opponents were often surprised to find themselves in a small minority. People want the radical change we are committing to in this strategy, and we politicians shouldn't be afraid to give it to them.
He’s dead right. I have firsthand experience of this, as I live in Walthamstow, which was one of the first ‘mini-Holland” neighbourhoods funding by Boris’s TfL. The local area has since been transformed with segregated bike lanes along all the major roads and residential streets severed by flowerbeds to prevent ratrunning. The opposition was immense, with an extraordinary local protest in which the antis carried a coffin down our main local shopping street to illustrate its forthcoming death.
But, as Boris rightly says, most locals quietly supported the plans and the street in question has since gone from strength to strength.
However, politicians have traditionally been reluctant to admit that the noisiest opponents are not always representative.
Low Traffic Neighbourhoods
As well as bike lanes everywhere, the paper signals the huge expansion of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods that we’ve subsequently seen. It also promises to consult on a right for residents to demand a low traffic neighbourhood in their network of streets. It also promises 12 mini-Hollands (like the one I live in) and one zero-emission city. Encouragingly, the paper notes that this could be combined with the zero emission bus town project, as opposed to treating them as stand-alone.
And there is an even more remarkable statement:
To receive Government funding for local highways investment where the main element is not cycling or walking improvements, there will be a presumption that all new schemes will deliver or improve cycling infrastructure to the new standards laid down, unless it can be shown that there is little or no need for cycling in the particular road scheme.
The paper also promises more bikes on trains and buses.
Planning
One of the most important differences between the National Bus Strategy and the Cycling strategy is that the cycling folk have understood the importance of planning. This exact line should have been in the National Bus Strategy (with the word “bus” replacing “cycling and walking”) but unaccountably wasn’t:
We will work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government and the Local Government Association to place cycling and walking provision at the heart of local plan making and decision taking for new developments.
They have set up a new quango called Active Travel England, which will be a statutory consultee for all new planning applications, to make sure cycling provision is up to scratch. Active Travel England will also act as an inspector; making sure the schemes that local authorities deliver are actually fit for purpose. Who is doing the equivalent task for buses?
Local authorities
As in the National Bus Strategy, the paper acknowledges that austerity has gutted local authorities of expertise:
We recognise that improvements will require building up the capabilities of local authorities, including new officer posts and training.
There is less clarity on where the money is coming from to pay for these posts.
Cash
The strategy announces £2bn of new funding.
As with the bus strategy, that sounds a lot of money until you remember the scope of the ambition.
The strategy is seeking bus lanes everywhere, repurposed neighbourhoods, upskilled local authorities, bike hangars in residential areas and is creating an entirely new public body.
Can all that really come from £2bn of funding?
I have a friend who has a tendency to treat his ambitions and his income as living in totally separate worlds. As opposed to tempering his leisure activities in response to his earnings, he does what he wants to do and earns what he earns. If earnings are greater than expenditure, then marvellous. If not, then he borrows the gap. There is no doubt that for both bus and bike, the Governments ambitions exceed its funding. The question is what will be their approach to the gap?
Conclusion
It’s a remarkable paper, literally unprecedented. It’s ambitions, visionary, intelligent and accurate.
If it has one gap it is that it doesn’t deal with the cost barrier to cycling as a mode. Bikes are a lot cheaper than cars, but few people sell their cars and buy a bike with the proceeds. For most people, buying a bike starts out as an addition to whatever their main transport solutions are. That means that it requires upfront investment, and many people can’t afford it. Data shows that cyclists are disproportionately likely to be white men in their 40s; that’s probably because white men in their 40s have the cash to buy a bike.
Bike hire schemes are part of the answer on this, allowing people to dip their toe in the water and incur expenditure on a pay-as-you-go basis but the paper is entirely silent on this.
Nevertheless, the paper stands out as the first in a series of modal strategies that are ambitious, visionary, detailed, intelligent… and largely unfunded.
