AN ACADEMIC MATTER

More students cycling would benefit everyone, says Rob Ainsley after meeting a professor of infrastructure

Few people cycle at university: less than 9% apparently, which I find surprisingly low. Some universities are cycling havens – 23% of York’s students cycle and at Cambridge it’s well over 50%. But the closest most students get to a bike is when the Deliveroo rider brings their pizzas, as I know from experience (not from when I was a student, but from when I was a Deliveroo rider).

Yet a bike is the perfect mode of transport for students: a cheap, low-maintenance way of getting around the campus while avoiding lectures. Many universities encourage cycling by offering free lights, route info, cheap-bike schemes and decent parking. Cycling’s a life skill too, and excellent preparation for commuter life. Especially in London, where it seems as though the cyclists often outnumber the drivers at many junctions during the rush hour.

So how can we give cycling lasting appeal to today’s undergrads? Promote it as the embodiment of modern student ideals, perhaps. After all, it’s environmentally sound, it’s been vegan for 130 years, it has no colonialist past, and it helped emancipate women and the working class.

Perhaps best of all, though, cycling is hated by a certain sort of white, middleclass, middle-aged man who can often be found pontificating against it in the House of Lords or the reactionary press. That alone should galvanise the national student body.

All of this was going through my mind while I was cycling to the University of the West of England, Bristol, the other day. A signed cycle path runs to the university’s Frenchay campus from the city’s harbourside, through scruffy but vibrant multicultural neighbourhoods. The path is a typically British mishmash: awful bits with unsigned junctions; better-thannothing sections shared with pedestrians, dog walkers and horse riders; and good, smooth parts that are segregated from the traffic but not enough to prevent a van from

The people implementing bike facilities generally don’t ‘get’ cycling

parking one of them. I did see some examples of good design along the way, except it wasn’t in the infrastructure, it was in the graffiti decorating the underpasses.

But why is our cycling infrastructure so bad? And more importantly, how can we make it better? Getting an answer to those questions was why I was in Bristol. I’d come to interview Prof John Parkin about his new book Designing for Cycle Traffic.

As well as being a professor of traffic engineering Parkin is also a lifelong cyclist and knows that bikes are the best, most efficient way of moving around cities. Obviously we know this too, but the difference is he can prove it with equations such as SC = P(1+N )(fX0) 0.2.3600/ .c . You S simply can’t argue with that, especially if you don’t appreciate the complexities of opposed-flow, signal-controlled junction capacity. Don’t worry, few people do, but sadly that seems to include the people behind much of our current infrastructure.

With the best will in the world, the people implementing bike facilities generally don’t ‘get’ cycling. It’s peripheral to them, an irritating hobbyist niche that has to be ticked off their to-do lists. Perhaps if they’d cycled more as students things would be different.

But things are improving, or at least Prof Parkin reckons they are. More engineers have worked on the successful recent bits of cycling infrastructure in London, such as the Cycle Superhighways, and know how to do it properly.

These facilities aren’t simply ‘good for cyclists’. They increase traffic flow – meaning more people are being moved per hour – so they benefit everyone. At last, we have a successful bike template for future road designers to follow, which is promising news for Manchester’s forthcoming Beelines. [See our interview with Chris Boardman, Manchester’s cycling ‘czar’, on p86 for more about the city’s Beelines.]

But if we’re going to keep building on this success, we need today’s students to be cyclists. That way tomorrow’s road designers, politicians, newspaper editors and other significant opinionformers (reality TV participants, talent show winners and so on) will be more likely to promote and enable the sort of procycling culture enjoyed by the Danes, Germans and Dutch. We might still get bad politics, biased media and flat renditions of power ballads on Saturday night TV. But we’d also get more fast, smooth bike paths.