Transport boss calls for 'century of cycling'

4 comments
By Richard Peace, in Yorkshire, UK | Monday, Oct 10, 2011 9.00am

Transport for London commissioner Peter Hendy has outlined a 25-year plan to make cycling the preferred method of transport for local journeys. In front of an audience of professional planners and policy makers at the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, he made the case for a programme of measures to herald what he called "the Century of Cycling".

These ideas included:

  • More and improved cycle lanes and cycle-friendly traffic-junctions.
  • More cycle training, not only for cyclists – both adults and children – but also bus and lorry drivers, to help reduce the 40 percent of cycling accidents that involve a heavy goods (HGV) or passenger carrying vehicle (PCV).
  • More cycle parking.
  • Easy-to-access journey/route planning information for cyclists.
  • Workplace and school travel planning to get the cycling culture ingrained into daily commuting.
  • Improving the reputation of cycling by challenging misperceptions of ‘danger’.
  • Using green spaces to make more attractive cycleways.
  • Continuing with Sky Rides and similar schemes.
  • Improving integration of cycling with other complementary modes of transport including rail and bus services.

Hendy said: "Cycling is on the rise and we need to push it to the forefront of transport provision, so that the real advances of recent years in London and in some regional towns and cities can fan out across the country."

London was held up as an example of progress, with cycling up 150 percent in the English capital since 2000. Hendy said improvements in road safety had been a major factor in the growth. UK cycling casualty rates have fallen from around 60 per billion kilometres in 1980 to between 20 and 25 today.

2010 appears to have been a particularly good year for cycling in the capital, with a 15 percent increase in cycling levels and an increase in cycling injuries of just nine percent over the previous year, suggesting an improvement in cycling safety per kilometre cycled (ie. cycling rates rising faster than accident rates). 

Hendy also used the lecture at the CILT to launch The Hub, a new and free online source of carefully-selected guidance for those working to get more people cycling – much of it inherited from Cycling England.

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User Comments

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  • First let's scrap the C2W joke (mostly (ab)used by existing keen cyclists to fund their hobby) and invest the money in cycle lanes.

  • cycle lanes where i live are badly planned and more dangerous than the road by a long way. personally dont use them as theres always cars/motorbikes/council vans etc parked in them. the cycle to work scheme is brilliant and yes some (me included) have used it as interest free finance but equally i know of at least 20 people who wouldnt have bought bikes and use them on a regular basis. your posts reads like a bitter comment from someones whos employer doesnt offer the scheme...

  • Bitter? Not really. I'm in the trade so I can buy bikes at staff prices.

    At work I just happen to see that the majority of people purchasing the bikes on C2W are neither wannabe commuters or the poor.

    There are usually already keen cyclists having more than one bike in their sheds and they just buy another one (very often selling it soon after or stripping it down for parts) or they are just normal customers who would be buying a new bike anyway, but they have an opportunity to save money thanks to the scheme (at the cost of other taxpayers). They do it because they can.

    The problem for most of potential commuters aren't bike prices but the fear of traffic. A PROPERLY DESIGNED, USABLE network of cycle lanes will get more people into cycling than any complex and prone to abuse government schemes.

  • i sort of agree, but i think what puts most people off is, bone idleness, laziness, rain, wind, not looking cool. and the big one for me is the lack of covered and secure places to store a bike from the magpies.

    to easy to nick and the police dont care. most employers dont have facilities, for instance there is a 6 story building which has around 400 people working in it and guess how many bike racks there are? thats right 6, and on many occasions there were only 2 bikes there on a working day and one of those was mine!

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