Cycling Struggles – a summary

“I found though, when you’ve passed your test and you get a car, you just automatically get lazy, do you know what I mean? … My brother used to say, ‘you’ll use the car just to nip to the shop’; I was like ‘no, I’d never do that’. But you do.”

(Sandra, Leeds, group discussion)

“What would make me cycle more? I think if there was more of a culture of cycling, if lots of people were doing it, I would too probably. I’d be a sheep and I’d do it. I’ve told you about my love of crowds. Being a football fan, I’m terribly susceptible for doing what is the common thing to be done, and if everybody in this street was all getting on their bikes and nipping off somewhere then I would probably be doing it as well. But when you are the only person doing it, and everyone notices you doing it, then it doesn’t have the same appeal.”

(Brian, Leeds, interview)

Cycling accounts for 2% of all trips in the UK. Just over the North Sea in the Netherlands, the figure is 26%. The Dutch have made cycling normal in a way we have not. Between 2008 and 2011 a major Government-funded research project, Understanding Walking and Cycling, investigated the reasons for UK cycling’s continuing abnormality as a short-distance mode of city transport, in order to learn how to make cycling normal. Between October 2012 and February 2013 I published nine Cycling Struggles based on the research. This summary of the series is overdue, but first let’s recall the stories:

• Rick (Cycling Struggles, 1) recently returned to city cycling after becoming frustrated with the congestion he confronted whilst driving. But along main roads and through bigger junctions – even those supposedly made ‘cycle-friendly’ – he gets off and pushes his bike. He’s not growing more confident at dealing with difficult cycling conditions, he’s refusing to engage with them. Although he’s enthusiastic, Rick’s city cycling is partial and fragile.
• Much to her surprise Nadia (Cycling Struggles, 2) is a recent convert to cycling. Her story partly demonstrates how individual agency can win out over anti-cycling structure; despite a route which has a stretch  hostile to cycling and a husband who worries about her riding it, she has negotiated a cycling to work habit by sometimes accepting a lift over that worst part of her journey. Nadia’s story demonstrates how cycling is importantly mediated by the love of others.
• Fabian (Cycling Struggles, 3) stopped cycling after being knocked off his bike twice in quick succession, but three years later he’s returned to regular riding. Fabian’s story demonstrates how committed people must be to persist in cycling through anti-cycling space.
• In the abstract Holly (Cycling Struggles, 4) sees cycling as a good thing, but in practice she considers it much too dangerous and won’t ride until it’s made safe.  Some of her friends cycle but current conditions prevent Holly joining them. Just seeing others cycle, let alone the thought of cycling herself, makes Holly feel uncomfortable, leading to a benign hostility to cycling which is I think widespread.
• In the deprived inner-city (Cycling Struggles, 5) cycling feels irrelevant. Affluent people might see the bicycle’s relevance as a mode of transport even as they ride almost exclusively for leisure, yet the sea of cars which these more privileged people’s everyday movements creates obliterates any view of cycling – either as transport or leisure – for people marooned in the inner-city. A few inner-cities are being gentrified and re-made for cycling, but the majority inner-city experience remains one of oppression by other people’s cars in which the bicycle’s potential is drowned.
• Cycling’s status is low within Britain’s south Asian community (Cycling Struggles, 6). As elsewhere people here have been working hard to incorporate cars and driving increasingly into their lives. How darkly ironic if now, mission almost accomplished, the game changes and they’re told the car is no longer King, Bicycles Rule! Alas no such message is being received here; so firmly in the car’s grip, why would anyone choose a practice so weird as cycling?
• Pavement cycling (Cycling Struggles, 7) is extremely easy to comprehend but highly problematic to the future of cycling. It indicates a lack of cycle-friendly infrastructure, and huge suppressed demand for cycling (if some people cycle despite having to ‘break the law’, how many more would surely do so if they could ride both comfortably and legally?). Pavement cycling tells a truth: cycling is not being promoted when people have nowhere to ride except illegally on the pavement.
• Family cycling in cities (Cycling Struggles, 8) is a margin of a margin. Cycling alone is difficult enough; encouraging children to cycle, and riding together, almost impossible. A phenomenon that ought to be central to healthy, livable cities is virtually extinct, cycling families abnormal almost to the point of deviance. That there’s so far still to go in making cities fit for cycling is underlined by the difficulty of imagining five people who currently (and invisibly) make a trip by car instead travelling together on five separate bicycles.
• Committed cyclists (Cycling Struggles, 9) are I suppose the kind of people we want everyone to become – willing and able to ride anywhere and everywhere, and certainly make local trips by bike; but they manage to do it now, in cities full of buses, trucks and cars. They have problems, but they’re not cowed by motorised traffic – they’ve learned to negotiate it, usually successfully. But these people are highly unusual in exercising such freedom of the city by bike. They are a minority because what they do is difficult; and they tend inevitably to develop strong cycling identities in the process of surviving and sustaining something so difficult to do.

Making Cycling Normal

This Cycling Struggles series has tried to paint a portrait of contemporary urban cycling. It’s neither perfect nor exhaustive, but I’d like to think it reasonably accurately reflects the present situation not just in Britain, but perhaps also other economically affluent, low cycling countries.

All the material I’ve used originated in the Understanding Walking and Cycling project. A book containing the project’s full findings is about to be published by Policy Press, as ‘Promoting walking and cycling: New perspectives on sustainable travel’. I’ve added an abbreviated version of the book’s chapter detailing findings from our qualitative work into cycling to this blog’s articles, as An Ethnography of Everyday Cycling.

To conclude I’ll say things I’ve probably said before, here and also elsewhere – on Bike Hub and in Cycle magazine back in 2011, on The Guardian’s Bike Blog earlier this year, and with John Parkin in the concluding chapter to 2012’s Cycling and Sustainability.

Things are certainly changing. The profile of cycling, including transport cycling, is growing. The cycling lobby appears to be winning more media exposure, political clout, and influence. Cycling levels are increasing in some cities, particularly central London. Cycling’s status appears finally to be going up.

But how significant and how durable are these trends?

Here there are two conversations which sometimes get confused:

• Recognising how more people are cycling, the first conversation is optimistic. Here change is coming from the bottom-up, one person at a time. Efforts to promote cycling are working;
• But the second conversation is pessimistic: the brutal realities of life on the streets mean that the thought of cycling is repeatedly being knocked out of people who might cycle; this situation won’t change without a top-down paradigm shift in transport policy and practice. Efforts to promote cycling are not working.

Neither conversation is right or wrong and both are useful.

For example the first makes sense when trying to encourage people to cycle; the second when we’re trying to persuade decision-makers of the need for change. The first can recognise, empower and sustain the multiplicity of grassroots projects so significant to British cycling; the second is better when arguing for huge resource reallocation in cycling’s favour.

Both conversations are required to make cycling mainstream.

The first conversation needs the second because without fully embracing a more ambitious discourse oriented to everyday mass cycling it will tend towards doing what we’ve already been doing, and thus ensure cycling’s reproduction as marginal. If we only keep doing what we’ve so far been doing, cycling will remain abnormal a long time yet. Believing that cycling is inevitably on the up stops the ramping up of criticisms, ambitions and demands required to break out this trap, and make cycling normal.

But the second conversation needs the first because a paradigm shift in cycling’s favour won’t happen without support from existing cycling organisations and cyclists. Those organisations and individuals have ensured cycling’s survival and have constructed the rudiments of a bicycle system which needs now to be radically improved, deepened and extended.

Final thoughts

Over the last half century urban Britain has grown used to living everyday life in and around cars. The car’s dominance over urban space has proceeded relentlessly but gradually, and people have adapted, such that they almost don’t notice. Acquiescence to the car has produced a rejection of the bicycle as an urban mode of transport. Given this context, normalising cycling requires the denormalisation of driving.

Despite occasional glimmers of hope cycling remains stuck in a vicious downward spiral:

• dire conditions make urban cycling unappealing, and more short trips get made by car. With little demonstrable demand, cycling is a low government transport priority and gets minimal funding. This lack of investment in cycling results in dire conditions …

But we could so easily switch to a virtuous upward one:

• a big boost in cycling funding alongside constraints on car use leads to a radical improvement in cycling conditions, which results in more people cycling and fewer journeys by car, leading to growth in cycling funding and further constraints on car use, encouraging still more people to cycle  …

Many people like cycling and would cycle more were conditions conducive. Other people are indifferent towards cycling, but this indifference stems in large part from lack of a cycle-friendly urban environment. For urban cycling to become normal it needs to be taken seriously. Government might like us to believe it is taking cycling seriously, but it is not; it is instead still ensuring cycling is driven off the streets and remains a minority activity which can as such continue to be treated tokenistically, where/when it cannot be ignored.

Taking cycling seriously means creating environments in which cycling makes more sense than driving. Towards that end, we should be removing cars from cities; if cars ‘can’t’ be removed (this is a political rather than inevitable ‘can’t’, and one which will therefore shift over time) their number should be reduced and their speed slowed; if reducing and slowing cars ‘can’t’ be done, cycling should be prioritised by giving it sufficient space to make it obviously more attractive to cycle than to drive, so that those left driving are only those who ‘have to’. In this way we’ll make cycling normal.

Blossom

It’s only once it starts waking up again that you realise quite how asleep the world has been; and although it’s not got much warmer, these last couple of weeks it’s really come alive. Yesterday the blossom, which is late this year, was particularly fine. The verges have sprung to life too, and are full of flowers.

You don’t need to go for a ride in the countryside to notice how everything’s growing so fast, and how much colour is emerging. One of the great things about blossom especially is it tends to follow where people live, so it’s all around us, even in a relatively treeless town such as Lancaster. But to ride out and experience the full sensory assault of this flourishing flora is one of the greatest pleasures of cycling at this time of year.

Yesterday I kept mainly to little lanes on a northerly loop from Lancaster. I rode over Hutton Roof and round Farleton Fell to Natland, just short of Kendal, then west to Brigsteer and round Whitbarrow, on to Levens, and back home via the Yealands and Kellets. Compared to many of my regular routes this is a more peopled and pastoral one; rather than roam onto and over moors and fells, it moves between hamlets comprising farmhouses made of stone and surrounded by trees. I hoped this would make for a more colourful ride; aware that it won’t be long before the blossom’s blown away and the countryside goes really green, I wanted to enjoy it whilst it lasts.

For mid-May it wasn’t warm; I was stung by a storm of hail stones as I climbed out the Kent Valley. But it’s a lot warmer than it was a month or so ago, the birds remain busy, and it’s beginning to smell properly of spring now; especially through the woodlands the air was heavy with the scent of wild garlic.

Road cycling is often seen as involving hard effort, long miles and tough climbs. Professional cycle sport and increasingly popular styles of riding such as sportives tend probably to perpetuate such an image. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons rural road cycling is so dominated by men? (I’ve not seen any studies on this but here my own experience supports anecdotal evidence – when riding outside the city, I’ll maybe see one woman for every ten men.)

But road riding can be, should be, is (has always been?) so much more than this; and yesterday– just to offer my own, little example – I was reminded of how it lets you move through (indeed become part of) a multi-sensory floral kaleidoscope.

As with cycling in general, if road cycling is to become more popular (and aren’t there very good reasons why it should?) we need to watch out for it getting constructed in mainly one way to the potential exclusion of others.

So let’s keep sight (and smell!) of road cycling’s different meanings. Indeed, let’s reflect on, discuss and promote them.

And whilst all this proliferating vegetation can be experienced via other modes, there’s no better way – I’d aver – than by bike.

Get Britain Cycling?

The sun’s out, the temperature’s rising. Spring seemed to take forever to arrive but suddenly now it’s here; everything’s going green, and yellow, and blue – there’s colour everywhere! At this time of year riding should really take precedence. But – even if I sometimes forget precisely why – it continues to be important to encourage others to cycle.

And hey … there’s a petition to sign!

Should we have to petition Government to take cycling seriously?

It’s easy to be cynical. We’re petitioning for a Parliamentary debate on cycling – for politicians to discuss the just-published Get Britain Cycling report. We’re asking British politicians to start talking seriously about cycling.

We could laugh, scorn or mock, but this is the situation in which we in Britain find ourselves, and pushing for a Parliamentary debate on cycling is currently our best hope of building top-down support for cycling.

In order for the report and recommendations from the Get Britain Cycling Inquiry to have a chance of being debated in Parliament, the petition needs 100,000 signatures. 54,084 people have signed so far; with I think the petition in danger of demonstrating what we already know – cycling, particularly belief in cycling as a major means of urban transport, is marginal (which is of course precisely why we need enlightened governance and political leadership).

So please, sign the petition, and ask others to do so too.

But realise that cycling is not in the news because of Government action; it’s in the news because of Government inaction. So more important than signing this petition is maintaining the broader, grassroots agitation for change which has led to it, and which is also applying political pressure in other ways.

Even if we do get the Parliamentary debate, I’m afraid we must expect it – and any Governmental response – to be inadequate. It’d be naïve to expect a Parliamentary debate on cycling to make serious cracks in the dominant car system, though it’s cracks we need; much more likely is continuing tokenistic support for cycling of the kind which keeps car use-as-ordinary undisturbed. Cycling politics is resurgent partly because it was repressed during a period of grossly ineffective cycling policy. (We might date this from the 1996 launch of the National Cycling Strategy (which aimed to increase cycling 400% by 2012) until the demise of Cycling England fifteen years later, in 2011.) During that period it felt like ‘things were being done for cycling’, though we know now they weren’t, really. Cycling levels did not quadruple; they stayed much the same, whilst car use for even the shortest journeys became more widespread, habitual and acceptable.

Freed from the constraints imposed by the hegemony of ‘realistic cycling policy’, in the last couple of years many of us have felt liberated to think cycling differently; we’ve stepped up our ambitions for cycling, and have started to talk about cycling as capable of challenging the car’s obese sense of entitlement to especially urban space.

We don’t necessarily know anything new. It’s more that we’ve found our voice, one repressed whilst dominant players within the cycling promotion industry enjoyed a cosy if ineffective relationship to Power. We’re learning to contest established cycling promotion orthodoxies, to be bold and audacious. About time really! After all, we’re only saying what everybody else – ‘ordinary people’ who’d quite like to cycle – already knows! But until now it’s been remarkably difficult to say these simple, obvious things.

We must be sure to hold tightly onto our new, bigger, bolder, better ambitions for cycling when responding to emerging Government rhetoric, policy and action. Because we don’t want a bit more cycling, we want mass cycling; and because some established players – cycling’s traditional representatives – will likely be far too easily satisfied.

In the meantime we must keep pushing from the bottom-up. Of course we must seek greater representation of cycling within ‘anti-cycling’ systems; but if we also cycle more, encourage others to cycle more, and support small, local projects aimed at getting still others to cycle more, then we simultaneously build the grassroots base which cycling needs to be politically more powerful and resilient.

Irrespective of whether or not it triggers a Parliamentary debate on the Get Britain Cycling Inquiry’s report, this petition will indicate to politicians how much support there is for cycling. Less than 100,000 signatures will demonstrate we’re still small – still a movement pushing at the outside rather than a voice to incorporate on the inside; still marginal, not mainstream.

Part of me tires of trying to get other people to take cycling seriously. Part of me thinks ‘sod it! Just enjoy your own cycling’. But then I remember the reasons cycling matters – its important contributions to local and global social and environmental dignity. Still, it’s hard to keep pushing cycling when people don’t want to listen, and when even those who do so often respond inadequately.

But then, things do change; and we need to create opportunities to help make them change.

So we must be sceptical optimists. We must keep hope that things can change dramatically in cycling’s favour. The ambitions of government towards cycling must surely rise sometime; just maybe, this could be the time!

100,000 signatures would give hope that Government might hear our audacious ambitions for cycling, ambitions which would genuinely start to crack the grossly dominant current car system. So please, if you think that’s important, sign the petition here. But know too that whatever Government does, it won’t be enough – we must become used to advocating cycling for a long time yet.

In the meantime, every body matters, so cycling and encouraging others to cycle remains the really important political work. Get out there and enjoy riding through Spring! It’s brilliant!

Dentdale

A strong westerly blew me out through Wray, Low Bentham and Ingleton, and up the Hawes road past Ribblehead viaduct to Newby Head Pass. 420 metres up, surrounded by windswept moor, this is the ride’s highest point. In bad weather it’s a slightly bleak and discomforting place.

The moors seem to stretch forever in all directions but actually I’m about to drop steeply down. It’s another world below, and amazing the speed at which on a bicycle you move between here and there; when the weather is wild, and it often is, to descend is to move from vulnerability to safety, but in any weather it’s to move from the remote and inhospitable to the cosy and familiar. The presence of even the smallest village is reassuring when cycling through less peopled places.

These aren’t thoughts so much as moods, so fleeting I could almost miss them. They emerge then evaporate as I make my temporary place by pedalling through space. Neither thoughts nor moods settle; cycling bypasses psychology. A long ride especially squashes mulling and mithering, helping me dwell in a calmer place, to become a simpler being. It’s good for my mental health.

The best part of this ride starts at Newby Head Pass, with the turn onto the minor road into Dentdale. This is a ride within a ride really, pedalling Dentdale’s length. Although it’s a Yorkshire Dale, you actually enter Cumbria here.

The lane undulates over the moor at first, then turns north-west and starts to drop. The viaducts of the Settle-Carlisle railway appear below, and then a short stretch of steep descent later their mighty arches are rising dramatically above. Of course you need to pay attention to the road – this is an elemental place and rock, stone and wood mark water’s path across its surface, and like many roads round here it’s been gouged away by the long, hard winter; but especially when riding alone I crane my neck to witness the convoluted topography as it swiftly shifts in passing from moor to dale.

There’s no static point. Occasionally I create one by stopping for a photo but this feels like an injury to the ideal cycling experience; a big part of what makes this ride special is the elimination of a fixed viewpoint, replaced instead by the fluid, continuous unfolding of the tight relationship between bike, body, road, land and air. Any ride can produce this experience but the stretch of road from Newby Head to Dent village six miles later is the best I know, and makes it amongst my favourite rides.

The railway pushes through the Dale’s head at about the height at which the many becks flowing from the surrounding fells form the River Dee. You’re properly in the Dale now, right next to the River.

The road falls over the next few miles, as it skirts Whernside’s northern flank. You accelerate with the downward gradient into the ride’s most thrilling stretch. Your speed together with the need to focus on the road ahead means that awareness of this magical place isn’t really cognitively or even aesthetically felt. You become blurred with trees, water, rock and road. You lose, escape, who you are. This surely is cycling’s greatest pleasure – your own displacement.

The River’s always different; it often disappears beneath its limestone bed. In water’s absence it feels like you become the downward constant.

You can ride this stretch more slowly but I think you lose something by doing so.

From Cowgill lanes run either side of the Dee. I cross a narrow, hump-backed stone bridge to ride the northern bank. At the junction here, the Coal Road north climbs out the valley past Dent Station, England’s highest, and over to Garsdale Head.

The lane and river stay tight together for another mile before separating slightly just short of Dent village. In the six miles since the Dale’s head the road has dropped three hundred metres.

I enjoy riding over the cobbles through Dent village; they form a stretch long enough to transport me temporarily to Paris-Roubaix, yet short enough to produce no pain.

Rather than ride the Dale’s length I sometimes climb my way out just beyond Dent, from Gawthrop over to Barbondale. But this time I want to cross the last bridge over the River Dee, just before it flows into first the Rawthey and then the Lune.

The lower Dale changes dramatically. It opens out and becomes more gentle. This change is geologically underpinned, the Yorkshire limestone of upper Dentdale giving way to Cumbrian rock. My riding style shifts according to these deep structures; I come off my drops and onto my hoods, my shoulder’s open, my gaze lifts; the intense riding of the upper Dale gives way to a broader, more relaxed outlook.

The lane gets bigger. The Dee no longer sticks so rigidly to its side but moves away to become a more ordinary river. The road starts to rise as well as fall and for the first time since the Dale’s head I feel the miles accumulating in my legs.

Just before the Dale’s end I drop to the Dee a final time, to cross to its south side via the slender bridge at Catholes. After twelve incredible miles I’m leaving Dentdale behind. I climb round Holme Fell and drop into the Lune Valley. From here it’s twenty-five fairly flat miles along the Lune back home to Lancaster.

Longer Days

The seasons matter to cycling. And cycling makes the seasons matter.

In the north-west of England we’ve finally emerged from the harshest Winter. The days are growing longer and warmer. The deep cold has gone and life is returning to the land.

Struck by a cold, I was off the bike for a week but, with my strength coming back, each of the past few days I’ve ridden out of town for a short, gentle ride towards the end of day. It’s a lovely way to spend an evening, enjoying the quiet lanes and lengthening shadows as the sun falls over Morecambe Bay.

Last night I left the house at 7:30 to do a little loop into the Forest of Bowland and up to Jubilee Tower. Lambs bounced around the fields, hares sprinted away at my approach, and birds busily prepared themselves for the night ahead. Occasionally a farmer’s tractor or quad-bike trundled somewhere in the distance, but the lanes were empty of cars. I love the feeling of having all this countryside, all this space, virtually to myself; I sink into it, become blurred, am content.

I hurtled back down to the quiet Sunday night city, passing the Town Hall clock as it chimed a-quarter-to-nine, some light left still in the sky. For the next two months each evening will grow a little longer, and hopefully warmer too. Isn’t this the very best time of year to be on a bike, with the longest days and best weather up ahead? Our bodies turn with our pedals towards the optimism which Spring surely brings.

Winter’s cold and dark tempts the closing of curtains and indoor retreat. Spring seduces us back to the world outside. The scope for cycling becomes suddenly so much greater. The traditional pro-cycling calendar reflects this – we’ve had the early season Spring Classics and can now anticipate the Summer’s Grand Tours. Locally too Winter’s dormancy has retreated and the cycle racing season begun, the weeks now crowded with events.

Winter cycling is great, but includes a certain amount of ‘getting through’. Winter cycling matters, but always buried within it is an orientation to brighter, better days ahead. Many people cycle only once it gets warmer, but surely no one cycles just in Winter.

We know how seasonal cycling is, how warm weather triggers the inclination to cycle. The bike shops get busy, new people on new or refurbished bikes are out and about. Of course we need to create conditions which compel people to cycle all year round, but in the absence of bolder, broader institutional support for ordinary cycling it’s understandable that most people’s interest in riding changes with the weather.

We are ‘a cycling family’, but cycling is seasonal for us too. On Saturday morning I went with Bobby and Flo to our brilliant local children’s cycling club, Salt Ayre Cog Set, where weekly sessions have resumed. Both complained bitterly at being made to go; I was ‘the baddie’ forcibly breaking their long winter hibernations in which lazy stasis inspired by staring at screens has taken centre-stage. But the sunshine, sociability, fresh air and exercise boosted their energies, and they came away bubbling with enthusiasm, as though participating had sprung Spring within their very souls.

Springtime cycling is a mechanism for lifting our spirits and horizons, taking us to other, farther, more interesting places.

Of course for those of us who ride year round Spring feels so good partly because of the Winter that came before, as well as the Summer that lies ahead. Contrasts are everything: even the places through which we most regularly ride change dramatically; and as the temperatures rise and the days lengthen cycling becomes less shackled by some Winter essentials: lights, layers, gloves and hats; things can gradually be discarded. There’s a ‘freeing-up’ both of cycling and our selves.

My little ride last night was not cold, but we have yet to experience a truly warm evening this year. At long last, though, it’s feeling possible; the dreamy, delicious prospect of the after-dinner short-sleeve and shorts ride through warm and windless air has moved one step closer.

Cycling 2050

Below I outline three possible scenarios for cycling’s global role in 2050. I then extrapolate current major trends to conclude with what I personally consider to be cycling’s most likely role in the world of 2050.

1. Mass velomobility

Widespread concerns about health, climate change and livability have translated into advocacy for and implementation of a radical set of policies, re-shaping the transport environment, and especially cities, away from motorised modes and towards cycling. Massively increased fuel prices combined with high levels of tax on both ownership and use of motorised vehicles have accelerated social and cultural change towards sustainable modes of mobility. These processes started first in the world’s most prestigious cities – such as London, New York, Berlin and Paris; but caught on quickly and spread across the globe, including to cities which in 2013 had been leaving cycling behind.

Little motorised traffic penetrates urban space, which is characterised instead by parks, trees, and people meeting, walking or cycling. The benefits of these changes have ensured they are embraced, encouraging still further change. The private car is extinct and has disappeared as a status symbol. Short journeys are walked, but cycling is the normal mode of transport for almost everyone for journeys beyond two kilometres but less than ten kilometres: some people use e-bikes to help with lack of fitness, steep hills or longer distance; some people (particularly young children) and freight are transported locally by load-carrying (often electrically-assisted) velomobiles. High quality public transport systems exist, but within cities their use is considered inferior to the making of journeys by bike.

Urban space is pervaded by a spirit of community, neighbourliness and conviviality. The release of space from parked and moving cars has ensured plenty of room for walking and cycling to mix without conflict. A new understanding of cycling has developed – as a practice which has helped safe-guard human well-being on the planet; cycling is therefore considered fundamental to ‘the good life’ and is rarely seen as difficult. History books and children’s stories tell of ‘the time of the car’, but the youngest generation scarcely believes it; imbued with an ethic of living sustainably on a finite planet, it takes for granted the localised, resource-lite, energy-efficient lives which are now normal.

2. Going Dutch

Increasing concerns about health, fitness, pollution and climate change have led to re-shaping of urban space away from the car and towards the bicycle following the lead shown by (and the best practice pioneered in) the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Growing public demand and government support for cycling form part of a broader desire for less car-centric cities in which people choose between different modes, with cycling favoured for shorter journeys beyond walking distance.

Cycling is generally regarded as ‘a good thing’, but partial resistance to it remains across areas of the world which had previously embedded car use as normal (north America, Australasia, much of Europe) or which adopted a culture of car ownership and use more recently (Latin America, Africa, Asia). Levels of cycling vary greatly: continuation of pro-cycling policies in many northern European countries means cycling usually accounts for over half of urban journeys; elsewhere cycling (including assisted cycling) typically accounts for between 10 and 30% of all urban journeys.

Cycling is still being actively promoted by government and other institutions, and remains in competition with other modes (trams, buses, trains and cars – whether privately or collectively owned). It is designed into the urban fabric in various ways: in central urban areas, which are now generally car-free, it tends to share space with (and give way to) pedestrians; further out it tends to be separated from other modes along bigger, busier roads but to mix with them on quieter residential streets, where speeds are below 30 km/hr. Cycling is typically afforded priority over motorised modes within urban space, but this priority is challenged across suburban space, and reversed across rural space (where cycling remains predominantly a leisure practice).

As urban cycling levels have increased, people have gradually re-organised their values, attitudes and lifestyles around it, so that whilst some groups remain resistant to actually doing it, hostility to the idea of cycling has declined, and it is widely accepted as a normal means of moving around. However, the bicycle’s status is highest and cycling as a mode of transport most popular amongst affluent, educated urban groups (and very popular amongst retired people as an active, healthy mode of (mainly rural) leisure). Attempts to sell ‘the Dutch model’ of cycling have expanded to all parts of the world, including India and China.

3. Business-as-usual

Levels of cycling remain relatively high across parts of northern Europe, reaching 50% of all journeys in a select few Dutch, Danish and German cities. Elsewhere there are some ‘cycling beacons’ (often hyped by short-lived institutional efforts to boost cycling in particular places), but levels of cycling remain generally negligible, at a few per cent of total urban trips. Countries where cycling was once common, such as India and China, have become more organised around the car; problems associated with transport congestion and pollution have grown dramatically.

Cycling continues to be seen in some places as a potential solution to assorted problems but it remains a struggle to convert positive rhetoric into more utility cycling; in other places cycling has become a discredited ‘solution’ – past efforts to promote cycling have failed, so the search for solutions has moved on to other ‘eco-friendly’ transport projects which fit better the interests of neo-liberal capitalism, such as new generations of ‘smart cars’, car-sharing schemes, and high-profile public transport projects.

Outside the few places where utility cycling is ‘normal’ it continues to be seen as a fringe activity of small, inconsequential sub-cultures; many people from these sub-cultures still advocate cycling as the most efficient, healthy and sustainable means of urban transport but their advocacy fails to make much impact, either on public opinion or governmental and other institutional agendas and policies. However, cycling does attract small, isolated pockets of funding for little local projects aimed mainly at children or ‘hard-to-reach’ groups.

Conclusion: cycling futures

The least likely of these scenarios is surely the last, ‘business-as-usual’. Culture and society change continuously; nothing stays the same; so the idea that things 37 years from now might remain much as they are today seems unrealistic.

Three major trends likely to have an impact on people’s willingness to cycle are obviously underway:

1. Climate change and its unintended and serious consequences is established scientific fact. But without strong institutional intervention, lifestyle changes in response to the realities of climate change will be highly uneven, both geographically and socially;
2. Amongst the world’s richest people, the car’s status is in decline and the bicycle’s status is on the rise. These appear to be long-term trends, not short-term fads;
3. Cities across much of the ‘rich’ world are becoming susceptible to ideas (and associated re-shapings) around livability – no longer mainly places to escape, they are being re-made into desirable places in which to live, work and play.

This suggests two potential futures for cycling:

1) Based on cycling remaining an elective practice

The urban rich embrace cycling as a genuine response to anxieties around climate change as well as a marker of a new, middle-class lifestyle which prioritizes livability. Urban governments will increasingly respond to and seek to capitalise on cycling’s rising status, both with public bike schemes and more cycle-friendly spaces. But poor people will be pushed out from cities and, together with rural populations, will be less inclined as well as less able (because of longer distances and less hospitable conditions) to cycle.

2) Based on cycling being increasingly structured into the urban environment

Here an urban elite institutionalise their increasingly favoured practice of cycling, and – if they are able to do so across urban space generally – there is a chance they might also democratise it. This ‘democratisation’ will occur both because improved infrastructure for cycling will enable people from beyond the urban elites (temporarily) to gain its (diminishing) status effects, and because the ‘colonisation’ of urban space by this ‘elite infrastructure’ will coerce people into using it. (I am not shying away from the difficult language of coercion and colonisation here, but would note that it can just as easily and equally be applied to on-going processes which result in car-centric cities and lifestyles.)

Of these two potential futures (I’m not talking about the three earlier scenarios now), I think the first is more likely and the second is more desirable, especially if it can be facilitated and made more palatable by informed, critical and progressive cycling advocacy. It is the second which would best ensure 2050 is characterised by mass velomobility.

Skills for Sustainability

Sustainability is not simply a concept; it’s more importantly a practice, or rather, a set of practices, one of which is cycling. And sustainability won’t just happen; it must be taught.

If we don’t teach children to cycle many simply won’t learn. Raised by car-dependent people in a car-based society, they’ll be more likely to perpetuate than to challenge and change that society.

Cycling is a practice of sustainability. Teach a child to ride a bicycle and we teach her how to make an effective contribution to a different future, a sustainable planet.

A society serious about making cycling the normal mode of short-distance travel must teach cycling. The best place to teach cycling is in schools. That way every child learns how to ride; just as important, it sends a clear signal that cycling is serious – taken seriously by government and to be taken seriously by citizens.

The Department for Education is currently consulting on reform of the school curriculum. With cycling’s profile riding high, this provides an excellent opportunity to push cycling onto the curriculum, so every child learns how to cycle.

Would this be putting the cart before the horse, encouraging all children to cycle before conditions are made more conducive to cycling?

Everyday cycling needs to become systematically embedded in society. That includes giving everyone the capacity to cycle through teaching everyone how to do it: how should a bike be set up? Why and how do you change gear? What’s the best position to take at junctions? How can you interpret what other people around you are likely to do? How do you decide which route is best for cycling?

Of course cycle training must occur alongside infrastructural changes which make cycling easier. We know the current cycling environment is badly deficient and we know many ways it could and should be made better. Such improvements in actual cycling conditions are necessary but they don’t preclude (and quite possibly in some respects depend upon) improvements in cycling skills and confidence.

Wherever they cycle, under whatever kinds of conditions, people need to know how to ride safely, sensibly and confidently. And as with most things in life, it’s better to learn at an early age and from experienced and thoughtful teachers than it is to muddle through (picking up bad habits) by yourself.

Teaching people how to ride makes them more likely to ride; and more cyclists are a civilising force on the urban environment and could pave the way for less experienced cyclists who might currently be too timid to give cycling a go. More cyclists will also give cycling a stronger voice for further changes.

So teaching cycling is an essential part, if not the only part, of making cycling genuinely ‘for all’.

Motoring organisations such as The Automobile Association (AA) and IAM (Institute of Advanced Motorists) – as well of course as the various cycling organisations – support the push for cycle training’s inclusion on the National Curriculum, a push being led by the Association of Bikeability Schemes (TABS). If you want to see and/or use TABS’ submission to the Department for Education’s consultation, which closes on 16^th April, go here.

You can email your response to: NationalCurriculum.CONSULTATION@education.gsi.gov.uk

Shifting away from short-distance travel by car and towards sustainability assumes that today’s children will incorporate cycling into their lives and across their lives, instigating a long-term trend towards urban space governed less by cars and more by bikes.

But with cycling literacy still so low and so few cycling parents around to help, this new orientation to cycling won’t just happen. It must be manufactured; children must be given the resources to ride from someplace outside the home. This is surely what education’s all about – to change the world for the better, not merely reproduce it as it inadequately is?

I love it that my kids cycle; but they’ll be much more likely to keep cycling if other kids cycle too. And if all kids cycle they’ll keep one another cycling, and together they’ll build cycling as a mainstream activity, create a society organised more around cycling, and contribute to a sustainable future.

I know this, you know this, but does the Department for Education know this? Possibly not, unless we tell them.

Indoor Cycling

I feel slightly reckless writing about indoor cycling; like it’s embarrassing – both to admit doing it, and to imagine it could be worth thinking about.

But I’ve been doing it a lot this week. Spring felt almost here but suddenly slipped away; strong and icy winds from the east have blown away my interest in riding outside. Yet the racing season’s arrived and I’ve some (modest, personal) goals I’m keen to achieve. Turbo training’s the answer.

Actually it’s clear that many people prefer indoor to outdoor cycling; if you see cycling less as a way of moving around than as a route to improved fitness, indoor cycling’s perhaps best.

Anyway indoor cycling is still cycling, isn’t it? So thinking about it might be illuminating.

Although in my own mind indoor cycling isn’t ‘the real thing’, furiously pedalling nowhere does have advantages:

• it minimises washing – just a pair of socks, shorts and towel. In contrast, outdoor riding at this time of year generates endless laundry;
• my bike stays clean;
• it’s quick – in ninety minutes I can set myself up, do an hour’s quality training, clear away, and shower;
• I can ride to music – something I never do on the road. This is a treat; each of the last four days I’ve used Last FM to select tunes centred around, respectively, Julian Cope, The Four Brothers, Dinosaur Jr, and Fela Kuti, which has been ace!

Indoor cycling builds fitness; given urban cycling in Britain undoubtedly gets easier the fitter you are, I’m surprised there aren’t cycling promotion projects encouraging indoor cycling as a way of equipping people for outdoor cycling. (I’m not seriously suggesting this – it’d be much better to make conditions conducive to slower cycling.)

So why does indoor cycling make me uneasy?

To ride indoors is to cycle in order to improve health and build fitness. Indoor cycling is attractive because it brings the fitness benefits of cycling without incurring what are widely perceived to be cycling’s costs – principally the need to ride in a motorised environment.

Participating in an indoor cycling class probably brings additional social benefits; even if the pain is personally felt, the group can bond in shared suffering. I don’t know participation figures (there’s need for research), but indoor cycling is clearly an important industry; classes are popular, and reach many people (especially perhaps women?) who might be reluctant to ride on the road.

But whether done individually or socially, indoor cycling is a reduction of cycling as we have come to know it.

Obviously, for those who prefer indoor cycling this reduction is good  – why suffer the difficulties and indignities of ‘real cycling’, when you can stay at home or drive to the gym and pedal ‘comfortably’ (if also painfully and sweatily) in an ‘acceptable’ way? From this perspective it’s outdoor cycling, not indoor cycling, which is strange.

I think my worry is based on the fear that the idea of cycling as a health & fitness practice might gain too much ground.

Cycling practitioners are understandably excited about the UK Government Department of Health’s current enthusiasm for cycling; this represents a new (or revived) discursive push (‘cycling to health’) and new money for cycling. All well and good, so long as cycling simultaneously becomes more central to – rather than deflected away from – transport discourse. We know cycling can satisfy multiple public policy goals, so that cycling for transport ticks many health boxes too; but give cycling for health too much emphasis and we could end up with more enthusiasm for riding inside than out.

Most people who love cycling probably have their own sectional interest/s – for transport cycling, cycle sport, recreational cycling, cycle tourism, cycling for health, cycling as a form of social inclusion, and so on. On the one hand this is great; cycling contributes to many things and it’s good it has champions in different spheres. But on the other hand I think it’s clearly transport cycling about which people most need persuading and which most needs championing; so we need to remain alert to the possibility that by becoming more about health and fitness (or sport, or anything else) some of the current impetus towards transport cycling might dissipate.

I think that’s the concern at the root of my unease about indoor cycling. As part of a wider cycling lifestyle, it’s fine. But too great an emphasis on health and fitness and too much riding indoors risks the imprisonment and impoverishment of a practice capable of changing the world.

All cyclings are good, and in building a cycling system it’s important that at central government level cycling is pushed not only within and by the Department for Transport but also within and by the Departments for Culture, Media & Sport; Health; Energy & Climate Change; and all the others too.

But some cyclings are better than others; and it’s pushing cycling as transport (at the car’s expense) which is key to building a better, fairer society.

Tomorrow, whatever the weather, I’m going to break out of the house and go somewhere, anywhere, by bike.

Mainroading Cycling

Below is a sequence of photos I took yesterday afternoon as I rode three miles south from Lancaster city centre along the A6 to Lancaster University. The journey took about ten minutes.

I can’t quite believe I’m posting so boring a set of photos! But please indulge me. We need to talk about the future of cycling on main roads, yet such conversations - much like cycling on main roads itself – remain repressed. Cycling is still expected to take the long route, via back roads.

This must change. It’s time to mainroad cycling.

Let’s look at this specific case, the A6 between Lancaster city centre and Lancaster University.

It’s a stretch I know well.

It is a key route linking two of the district’s biggest ‘trip attractors’. In the city centre are shops, businesses and key services, including the Royal Lancaster Infirmary and many schools. Lancaster University has over 12,000 students and 2,500 staff; supposedly committed to reducing car use to its campus, for the 17 years my life has been connected to this institution it has struggled in half-hearted ways to encourage cycling.

For the first two miles of the three mile route, the A6 runs through residential areas – there are three shopping parades, several pubs, a primary school and a supermarket. Beyond them the speed limit increases from 30 to 40 mph. The road is straight and climbs gently over the first mile before flattening out until the University’s driveway.

As a cycling corridor the A6 has been generally ignored. Much more effort has gone into creating alternatives to it than in improving cycling conditions along it. Although it’s very obviously the most obvious route to make cycle-friendly, it’s not been seen that way (for reasons you might know, but which I’ll not explore here).

Dynamo, the local cycle campaign, has recently decided to challenge this institutional indifference to cycling on the A6, and specifically to push for high-quality, continuous, dedicated cycling infrastructure along the entire stretch I rode yesterday. As cycling’s relevance becomes more widely understood and its profile rises, it’s time to mainroad – and so mainstream – cycling here.

Of course Dynamo expected some key individuals to be intransigent and require persuading, but not the County Council’s former Senior Cycling Officer and current Sustainable Travel Officer; he believes dedicated space for cycling along the A6 is impossible, because of lack of space (i.e. width) along some sections, and because residents would oppose the removal of on-road car parking along others.

In other words consideration of main road cycling along the A6 is in danger of falling at the first hurdle due to a dismal (especially given it’s coming from the County Council’s Sustainable Travel office) failure of imagination (that the road can look otherwise) and will (that priorities can be changed).

To me at least it’s obvious the road has room for dedicated space for cycling along this entire stretch; and it’s equally obvious that cycling should trump residents’ car parking – what’s more important, a few parked cars or many moving bikes?

So I find both excuses not just pathetic but also infuriating. I’m sure there are many nooks and crannies in government offices everywhere similarly stubbornly resisting an enlightened approach to everyday travel, so I can’t be the only one who gets really angry about this sort of thing, can I?

So, what’s it like to cycle these three miles?

For me, as an able-bodied, fit, confident, assertive, committed cyclist, it’s OK. I’ve grown accustomed to the strange sensation of a stream of speeding traffic sweeping past my shoulder; and I’m generally trusting in other people’s good intentions and capabilities not to run me down.

As we know, however (and this is probably a good thing!), I’m in a tiny minority. And I’m not so daft that I can’t imagine, as I ride, what the experience would be like for others unlike me.

The cars, buses and trucks come thick, fast and often close. You are moving through an environment utterly dominated by motorised modes, with no protection whatsoever. The driver has a metal shell, the pedestrian has the pavement, but the cyclist is exposed and vulnerable. People don’t know this so much as feel it, if only vicariously. Of course they’re not going to cycle here.

Short stretches of red painted tarmac come and quickly go, but it’s not really clear what they’re for; certainly they offer no protection. Cyclists are given the option of coming off the road to negotiate a big roundabout just south of the city centre, which wrongly presupposes people would be happy riding on the road to begin with.

The changes which have been made on the A6 have nothing to do with building a mass culture of ordinary cycling; they’re about providing enough to keep us quiet (even though those changes are often useless and/or dangerous – because, for example, they try to position you far too close to the kerb).

With the hindsight afforded by the Understanding Walking and Cycling research, I was extremely naïve to once believe ordinary cycling might ever grow under such conditions. It’s an insanely hostile environment to cycling.

My naivety was of course a (sub)cultural attribute and many cycling advocates have similarly swallowed and become deluded by their own rhetoric.

So people won’t cycle here. But we want people to cycle here. It is the most direct, flattest routes, with the most services, along which they’re most likely to cycle.

So what are we to do?

For this stretch of road, my own proposal is as radical as it is obvious and sensible. It entails twin changes.

First, reduce the speed limit to 20 mph. This will civilise the road, returning it from cars to people, and ensuring it’s a fitting gateway to a fine city. Most important slower speeds enable motorised modes to be squeezed closer together; cycling has been squeezed long enough and it’s re-prioritisation time.

This will facilitate the second change, of inserting a high-quality, continuous, dedicated cycling route. Because even with motorised modes limited to 20 mph most people won’t want to mix with the volume of traffic which is likely to remain for the foreseeable future on this road. Also, unless cycling is allocated clear space of its own it’ll continue to be pushed around by transport’s heavyweights.

How do we get these changes?

By believing in them, sharing them, and arguing for them. The fulfilment of cycling’s potential to change our world depends on it.

 

Cycling around Lisbon

I was working in Portugal last week.

Initially I was reluctant to go – it felt too far for what was essentially a one-day workshop. But when João Bernardino, who’d invited me, offered use of a bike whilst I was there, and told me Lisbon’s community of cycling activists would like to meet me, it became much more attractive.

It was a fantastic experience, the hospitality of everyone I met truly exceptional.

Ana Pereira greeted me at the airport. Ana is one of the founders of Cenas a Pedal – which is not ‘just’ a bike store or workshop, but a more total project striving to sell everyday cycling in a place where such cycling is still rare. It’s the kind of pioneering place which every city needs, and which will multiply and prosper as cycling’s popularity grows.

Ana rode a pedelec –the sort of bike perhaps most likely to democratise cycling in a hilly, low-cycling city such as Lisbon. She guided me out of the airport and along some big and busy roads to the city’s 1998 Expo site, and from there into a fierce wind along the Tagus River to the ferry at Cais do Sodré where we met João.

A true gentleman, João rode his wife Filipa’s bike and gave me his own. From Cacilhas on the Tagus’s other side we rode south towards the remote monastery where the workshop was to take place. The roads were full of cars; the dedicated cycling infrastructure was sometimes good, but too discontinuous to be really useful.

The Arrábida Monastery sits high above the Atlantic Ocean on the wooded slopes of the Arrábida Natural Park to the south of Lisbon. It’s a stunning place which feels a world away from the capital.

With a free day to explore before the workshop’s opening dinner, I rode east along the coast to the port city of Setúbal. I set out in thick fog but the road was quiet, it was a lovely ride, and the air cleared as I dropped towards the sea. It was the first time since October I’ve ridden without gloves, and the warmth made me impatient for spring – alas my first ride back home saw me battling through a blizzard!

The workshop was part of a European project investigating the long-term future of transport. We were discussing and developing scenarios based on the ‘mega-trends’ considered likely to shape people’s mobile lives over the next half century.

One ‘expert’ amongst others from different fields and from around the world, I felt like ‘the cycling guy’. I suppose it’s important that cycling’s represented in these kinds of spaces if it’s to have hope of moving in from the margins, so it was good to be there and I was happy to play that role.

But the highlight of my trip was Friday night; the workshop over, I shed my suit and had some fun!

From my hotel Hercules, Ana Santos, João and I rode to Cenas a Pedal where we met more people and rode together – “a mini-Critical Mass!”, as Ana from Cenas a Pedal described it – to the book store, Ler Devagar, where I was to speak. This is a vast anarcho-dream of a place – evidence of its former life as a printworks is everywhere, bicycles dangle from above, books of course are piled high, and then there’s beer, wine, coffee, music, and abundant indications of the space’s centrality to alternative social and political networks; to me it felt like heaven!

Ana Pereira began the evening’s conversation by explaining the work of MUBi, the Portuguese association for urban cycling.

MUBi advocates urban cycling as an ordinary means of moving around. Car ownership and use has exploded across Portugal over the last generation, and whilst it is on the up, levels of utility cycling remain very low. Mário Alves of MUBi told me that the proportion of commuter trips made by cycle in the city is currently 0.6%.

There is some dedicated cycling infrastructure, and some of it looks pretty good, but it’s woefully disjointed and there’s too little actual cycling for that dedicated space to be consistently recognised and respected by pedestrians. On the roads cars dominate, and whilst I was frequently impressed by the patience of drivers, it felt a harsh and unforgiving environment through which to ride. As I rode through the city I thought how, like many places, to ride here you have to be either committed or desperate.

This is the context in which MUBi is working, and – with minimal resources – doing an extremely impressive job.

But besides MUBi’s various projects aimed at promoting cycling, MUBi campaigners themselves – some of whom I was privileged to meet on Friday night – are crucial to the struggle for cycling. Passionate about the bicycle and clearly recognising the difference more cycling would make, they are cycling’s keepers, continuing to shine a light through the darkest days of automobility, actors of the greatest importance to future life.

This bears on one topic of my talk at Ler Devagar. We need strong sub-cultures of cycling to sustain our favourite practice through the darkest times (though from a sub-cultural perspective these can also of course be the best of times too). And as cycling’s staunchest advocates we’re the ones who are best placed to speak and work for more cycling. From what I saw MUBi is clearly doing a magnificent job on both these counts.

But there may come a time – and probably Lisbon is still a long way from it, and in the UK we are much closer – when activists might do well to look at their strategies for popularising cycling, and ask whether those strategies result from the identities they’ve developed in order to sustain cycling through bleak times, and whether they might at some point come to stand in the way of –rather than facilitate – making cycling a more normal practice in which identity is a less central factor.

As I say, I think cycling’s current marginality in Lisbon society makes such questions remote. And MUBi is well equipped to deal with them when the time comes. I know some people disagreed with what I said at Ler Devagar, but their willingness to hear, and to respond so constructively and respectfully sent shivers up my spine.

Wherever I go, I’m really struck by how cycling’s in such safe hands.

I’m a lucky man to be made welcome in strange places. In particular I have to thank João Bernardino for inviting me to Portugal in the first place, and also Ana Pereira, Ana Santos and Mário Alves for their extraordinary hospitality whilst I was there. Ana Santos and Mário are organising this year’s International Cycling History Conference. It was an honour to be in their company for the evening, and to get a taste of Portugese social life. Such community is our strength, and power.

Hey! I returned home to the clearest news yet of the urgently needed paradigm shift away from the car and towards the bicycle as an urban mode of transport. As an unrepentantly critical sociologist I’ll always find problems, but the promised changes to London over the coming decade are good news indeed (and reassurance to many of us that perhaps we’ve not been so idealistically deluded after all!).

As my new friends in Lisbon might say, “Viva a velorution!”