COMMUTING SENTENCES
Cycle to Work Day is coming (15 August), but does it work, asks Rob Ainsley....
It’s Cycle to Work Day on 15 August. Not International Cycle to Work Day, which was 9 May. Or Cycle to Work Week, back in June. Or Cycle September, which encourages workplaces to out-cycle-commute each other. Or ‘Ride to Work Week’ in June: that was for motorbikes. Er, why?
I know this from email invitations to complete surveys by marketeers unaware of the world outside office jobs. Do I cycle to work? No. Why not? The dropdown options never include ‘Office is living room downstairs, so need full-suspension mountain bike’.
Any initiative that encourages cycling is welcome. Especially commuting, which potentially removes two motor journeys a day. Leisure rides create them, celebrating the environment by driving hours to ride in it. Fuelling people to work with renewables – coffee rather than hydrocarbons – has allround benefits: fitter, happier workforce; cleaner, friendlier town centres; less congested, safer roads and more anti-cyclist comments on newspaper websites, thus keeping idiots busy in futile activity and away from real life.
Changing people’s travel habits is harder than removing a gap-year tattoo. York Council’s sustainable transport people quote me research saying 90 per cent only happen after a big life change, event or accident – new job, house move, health scare, marriage and so on. So they’re encouraging companies to give new employees a welcome pack detailing how bikefriendly York is. Get them cycle-commuting at the start and they’re more likely to continue, it appears. Better than doing it for a one-off day or week, perhaps expecting friends to sponsor them for charity, before reverting to the Mondeo.
In London every day is Cycle to Work Day. The rise in cycle-commuters there has been remarkable: between 2001 and 2011, says Cycling UK, the number doubled, to 155,000. Which I can believe, because
Changing people’s cycling habits is harder than removing a gap-year tattoo
154,999 overtook me each morning on Blackfriars Bridge. My recent visits suggest it’s doubling again.
Mostly, the growth is because the roads are full and bikes are the quickest way around the capital for the confident. But it’s also thanks to the two superb Cycle Superhighways that run east-west along the Thames between Westminster and Tower Bridge, and north-south between Elephant & Castle and (eventually) Kings Cross. Indeed, 70 per cent of Blackfriars Bridge traffic at rush hour is now pedalled, expanding the capacity of the bridge thanks to the space-efficiency of cycle lanes.
York bigs itself up as a cycling city. Nationally just three per cent cycle to work, but here it’s many more. The (recently rejuvenated, hooray) local Cycle Campaign did a survey on Lendal Bridge, York’s Blackfriars equivalent. It showed 40 per cent of peak traffic is cyclists. How much more if there was a Cycle Superhighway, for the less confident?
Some played the figures down – even cyclists, as if embarrassed. It was a sunny May morning, they said, not a rainy February afternoon. Presumably they’d only ask Arsenal’s stadium to have a capacity of 25, because while it does sometimes contain 60,000, that’s only weekend afternoon...
Such figures confirm the adage that cyclists are invisible until they bust a red light. Cars take up so much more space per person, so they’re all most councillors and politicians see. Yet there are almost as many people riding bikes as sitting in cars, hidden in plain sight, right under their noses. Perhaps they can’t smell us because of York’s off-scale pollution levels. (Nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter are causing more premature local deaths than William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North ever managed.)
The only way to get more people moving round our jammed towns and cities is configure the roads to get more of us doing it on two wheels. Your obligatory Netherlands comparison: it has great bike infrastructure through hard-headed Dutch time-and-motion efficiency – not because it’s green, but because it’s orange.
Cycle to Work Days are fair enough, but until our town centres are safe places for non-motor users the rest of the year, they’re like a supermarket bike: superficially tempting, but only work for one day...