Don’t tell anyone but Cycling in London is now rather good
Cycle infrastructure in London is becoming good. Digital information is not.
As we unlock, I’m starting to have more in-person meetings.
One of the curious things about this is that, with lots of people working from home, these tend to be in suburban coffee bars as opposed to central London offices.
The other day, I did a veritable tour of London; starting in my home in Walthamstow, then visiting Spitalfields, Bermondsey, Stoke Newington, Clapton and back to Walthamstow.
That day, I cycled 20 miles across North, South and East London and felt entirely safe. Pretty much the entire journey was either on dedicated cycle lanes, or quiet roads deliberately closed to traffic but permeable to bikes.
It made me realise that we’ve now reached the tipping point in which London is a great city to cycle round; at least in significant parts.
Yet, bizarrely, almost no-one knows.
Had I relied on CityMapper for my journey planning, I’d have ended up going down the A10:
At least Citymapper had me cross the Thames on London Bridge (which has a cycle lane). Google would have me crushed between the traffic and the fence on Tower Bridge:
While specialist app City Cyclist would have had me wheel my bike down Joiner Street as part of my trip. Unfortunately, Joiner Street is the least streety street in London, as it’s actually part of London Bridge station:
By far the worst was TfL’s own journey planner. (I think TfL Go may want me dead). Waltham Forest received £30 million of TfL funding for cycling infrastructure a few years ago, yet TfL’s app sends me on a route that avoids all of it.
Leyton High Road is just one of miles of utterly unsuitable roads that the app navigated me along, despite alternatives being available. No-one would take a second cycle ride if they attempted to follow the route suggested by TfL’s own app for their first:
Despite it being possible to do my full 20-mile journey in ease and safety, every mainstream route planning app would have sent me along roads that were dangerous, unsuitable or both - at least for part of the journey.
This is symptomatic of a curious thing: TfL has done a superb job in achieving the Mayor’s active travel goals, but it’s not so easy to discover.
The problem comes into three categories:
1) Data
2) Legacy
3) Coordination
Data
There is no single dataset that grades roads according to how suitable they are for cycling. As a result, every journey planner uses its own set of rules.
By far the best (and the only one that came up with truly safe routes) is the Cycle.Travel website run by Richard Fairhurst, but it is barely known to the person in the street. Richard and his team have had to put vast amounts of effort into manually adjusting their rules to compensate for the lack of simple datasets.
Given the prevalence of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, this is made all the more important as - frequently - the best routes to cycle along are not main roads with dedicated cycle lanes, but residential streets with a flowerpot in the middle.
It’s frustrating, as TfL have created what they report is the world’s largest cycling database. It surveys every road in London and includes both binary data (e.g. cycle lane yes/no) and 480,000 photographs. Unfortunately, the data and photos largely date from 2017/8 and are now out of date. Excellent cycle routes are avoided by journey planners using this data because the data doesn’t know that they are excellent cycle routes. In many cases, TfL’s own database isn’t aware of improvements made with TfL funding.
Moreover, the tickbox nature of the database just doesn’t work. As an illustration, look at the photo below (this is one of the roads TfL Go routed me down on my way to Spitalfields). According to the TfL database, it benefits from an advisory cycle lane in a differentiated colour, cycle signage and cycle road markings.
And, of course, it does indeed have all those things. But it’s entirely irrelevant as the signage is out of date, the cycle lane is buried beneath parked cars for its entire length and the road markings are ignored:
Legacy
This data problem is hugely compounded by the fact that there is a dataset for a London-wide cycling network. It’s called the London Cycle Network (LCN) and it was a project that ran from 2001 to 2010. During that period, a 900km long London-wide network of signed cycle routes was created. The signs are largely all still in place and many mapping companies incorporated LCN data. Apple Maps is one of them which is why, I suspect, I was sent down the road photographed above, as it’s a London Cycle Network road.
But the LCN is now entirely out of date. The photo above shows a road in Waltham Forest, in which TfL have invested £30m upgrading cycling infrastructure on virtually every other road except this one. This is almost the only road in Waltham Forest you wouldn’t want to cycle down - but it’s the one the TfL app sends you down, because it’s relying on a provider that is using a legacy dataset.
It’s absolutely critical that the LCN is reactivated and updated. The road photographed above should not be considered part of a cycle network but until the LCN is formally updated, it will remain so by default.
Coordination
The third big issue is that the London-wide network of cycle routes has been developed in dribs and drabs through different projects and funding pots; and they don’t gel together.
On my journey from Walthamstow to Spitalfields (i.e. the way I actually go, not the way any of the apps would send me), I start on the C23 cycleway and then move onto the Q2 cycleway. The Q2 was a TfL project delivered by the boroughs, while the C23 was a borough project delivered using TfL funding. As a result, the C23 stops on the border of Waltham Forest, around 30 yards from the Q2. Someone cycling up the Q2 would have no idea that the C23 (an outstanding route with dedicated, segregated cycle lanes its entire length) starts just out of line of sight.
If you go onto the TfL website to look for a map of cycle routes, you will easily find one. It’s the TfL “Cycleways” map and it shows all the TfL Cycleways. But only the TfL Cycleways. In Walthamstow, we are also served by the National Cycle Network Route 1 but this entirely traffic-free route is missing from the TfL map as it is not a TfL Cycleway. As are many other safe routes that happen not to have been created as a TfL cycleway.
One of the most useful cycle routes in central London is the East-West corridor across Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia along Torrington Place (and a bunch of other roads). It comprises entirely segregated cycle lanes in both directions but it pre-dates the Cycleways programme so doesn’t make the map:
All over London, lack of coordination means that cycling feels more like a series of individual schemes than a coordinated network.
Sweat the small stuff
Cycling in London at the moment is a bit like trying to use the bus network if none of the buses had destinations and only some of them had numbers. It’s perfectly do-able but it’s a lot more effort than it should be, and most people - frankly - won’t bother.
Given that in 2016 TfL committed to spend £154m per year on cycling infrastructure and then increased it further during the pandemic, it’s a real shame that so much expenditure and effort is underutilised.
Getting a single version of the truth dataset would not be super easy as definitions of cycle quality would need to be created that reflect actual experience as opposed to just infrastructure. But cycling benefits from a passionate lobby and if the definitions were right, the data could be crowdsourced. Updating the London Cycle Network requires ongoing operational investment.
To be honest, in terms of usage, spending what it takes on getting the data right (and to update the London Cycle Network) would be a much better use of the next tranch of cash than building more infrastructure that is hard to find - and it certainly wouldn’t take £154m.
It’s cycles + buses, not cycles or buses
I’ve written on these pages previously on this point, so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice to say that it’s all about alternatives to the car. That means that more cycling is good and more buses is good. The challenge is making sure that new cycle infrastructure is at the expense of cars (thus creating an incentive for modal shift) and not at the expense of buses.
A bus lane is not a prospective cycle lane; it is a bus lane and we need more of them. Given that bus speeds have been falling in London for much of the last decade, it’s critical that the new cycle infrastructure is an enabler to car-free living (which will benefit all modes of transport). When schemes are developed, the detailed choices made on each occasion must have as the goal to maximise the attractiveness of the high density and low carbon modes of transport. That means buses and bikes - and not cars.