🚲 Cycling in London Q&A: your questions answered!

London Cycle Routes has reached 10,000 subscribers! Thanks so much to everyone to tunes in to watch every week. Time to subscribe if you haven’t already!

In my last video I asked for questions from viewers, and in this video I’m going to answer them.

Don’t worry, it won’t just be me talking into a camera, I’ve set them to some relaxing summer cycling footage I had going spare.

If you enjoy my work and are feeling generous and want to support the channel, the best way is to sign up on the Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/londoncycleroutes

You can check out the map of all the London Cycle Routes videos here (Thanks Isaac and John)

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1h9Hxm57fPvZmcuSXajM_Wu0G0s6f_bs&ll=51.505213496092054%2C-0.1285238120117249&z=12

And the Safe Cycle London map I referred to in the video and use a lot is here:

https://www.google.com/mymaps/viewer?mid=1XlpvN9R-Wg7qZHyezO8y-eVlftr4e0WX&hl=en

This video features unused footage from two outings:

The first was intended to be used for a St Pauls to Kensington route, but I decided not to use it because of the broken elevator making it inaccessible. It was shot in May 2021.

The second bit of footage was intended to be Acton to Barnes, but I attempted it when Hammersmith Bridge was closed to cycling. The footage ends at the closed northern end of Hammersmith Bridge. It was shot in July 2022.

Hello and welcome back to London cycle roots today we’re going to do something a bit different I’m going to answer your questions about cycling in London and about the channel that’s because we’ve just reached 10,000 subscribers which I’m really pleased about a couple of people asked if I could do this and it

Sounded like a good idea I did think about doing it to camera but since that’s not why anyone watches this channel I’ve actually set it to some unused footage that I had lying around from the hot summer of 2021 so without further Ado let’s go so the first question today is from

Isaac Raskin who asks what is the most frustrating gap on the London cycle Network and before I answer that I just want to say a massive thanks to Isaac who looks after the London cycle Roots map and updates it without fail every week so massive thanks to him and also

To John levmore who originally set it up great work guys really appreciate it and for those of you who haven’t seen the map I’ll link it in the description as normal it’s a great way to browse through the different London cycle Roots videos and I probably don’t mention it

Enough as for the most frustrating gap on the cycle Network in this city without fail it’s High Street Kensington as you’ll have seen from the videos on this channel there’s a huge and growing cycle Network in North London South London East London and Central London and there’s also a growing Network in

West London but the West London network is completely severed from the rest of London by High Street Kensington and there isn’t really a good way around it probably half the requests for routs that I get on this channel are from places in West London to places in other

Parts of London and I simply haven’t got a good way of doing them because of High Street Kensington the council refuses to build anything and tfl doesn’t have the power to do it hopefully one day the council will either come around to the wisdom of putting cycle Lanes on High

Street Kensington or they’ll have the road taken off them and it’ll be handed to tfl which is something that an incoming government could do the next question is from David Shepard who asks if you were given the funding to make one cycle route where would you put it

Well apart from High Street Kensington I think there are probably two other obvious answers and it’s difficult for me to choose between them one would be a major route up through Northwest London maybe something like Edge wear Road or Abbey Road that is simply because the cycle infrastructure around there is

Genuinely really sparse so it’s proper loow hanging fruit if you build a big segregated route like the one we’re on in this video up there then you end up connecting so many more Town centers into the central London cycle grid if I can cheat a little bit the second thing

I would say would be an eastwest route across places like marburn fitzrovia connecting Hyde Park to the existing East West Route on Tavo place that is just a big Missing Link in London it’s not quite as frustrating as High Street Kensington as there are kind of ways

Around it but it would do a lot to open up a really major cycling Corridor that people already use but has even more potential than it already does the next question is from e.co who asks do you cycle to the start of your routs are they part of a circuit so basically

Asking about the logistics of filming these videos the answer is it varies making all this content for you guys is pretty timec consuming so I try and do it as efficiently as possible so ideally I will get sort of five six seven routes planned out that vaguely start at the

End of the previous route I will go out for pretty much a whole day when I’ve got the day off and the weather’s good which is not as frequent as you might expect effect and I will shoot them pretty much consecutively if I can get

Out and do that a couple of times I can then mix up the videos into different orders so that hopefully no one notices that that’s what I’ve done do I cycle to the starts of the videos sometimes if a route or chain of roots starts near

Where I live then I prefer to do that but sometimes if I’m going to a far flung corner of London like Somewhere Out near the M25 or whatever I could jump on TS link I could jump on the Elizabeth line I might even get the district line to get there cuz you can

Take your bike off peak and it doesn’t make sense to spend like an hour 2 hours hacking out to somewhere when I could use that time for filming more videos cuz as I say my time is relatively short and it does take quite a lot of time to

Get all this done sometimes though I will just go for a one-off ride particularly if there’s a particular thing I want to see or if it’s just near my house or if I haven’t got time or if I’m running out of stockpile footage I like to keep a load of footage just in

Case I can’t go out or if there isn’t a nice weather day uh but sometimes I run low and I just need to emergency go and do it after work to make sure that I produce a video more or less every week sometimes I do miss them that is

Connected to the next question which Tom ANS ask and he asks are you doing these rid for leisure in your spare time or are you commuting to various areas for work no 99% of the time I’m going out specifically to shoot these videos in my spare time although occasionally I might

Be able to shoot something on the way to work I did uh for about a year or so do a bit of part-time work as a deliver and Uber Eats Rider on a bike so I did use to cycle around London a lot for work but these days it’s limited to a fairly

Uh straightforward commute into Central London that is connected to the next question which Adam Edwards 7 te ask which is how do you find out about all this new infrastructure these new cycle routes new ltns that is a great question and it takes a lot of work to be honest

In terms of working out what’s going to be built I basically always look through the committee papers for all of the London borrows and just search for cycling traffic schemes things like that to see what’s on the radar so I have a pretty good knowledge of what’s going to

Be happening in all the Burrows social media is also a good resource there’s a lot of people who are quite nerdy about this stuff just as I am and uh they can help keep track um foi requests can be really useful for finding out extra information and you also need to keep an

Eye on the consultation Pages for tfl and the various different borers so that you kind of have an idea of what is going up there’s obviously no replacement as well for Intel on the ground so you need to go out and check whether something has been physically

Built so I’ll often when I’m not shooting videos I’ll just go on a scouting Mission or if I’m in a particular part of London even without my bike for another reason I’ll go and check if something has been built yet cuz it’s not always obvious this is kind

Of connected to the timec consuming thing which is that it really sucks when you think something’s been built and you’ve treed to the other side of London and it hasn’t been built and you go home empty-handed um and you know you waste a sunny day or whatever so uh yeah I like

To keep on top of what’s going on there I also work really closely with the guy who does the the safe cycle London map we share information with each other about what’s been built what’s coming up and also when we find old infrastructure cuz Believe It or Not There is loads of

Old cycle infrastructure that isn’t really mapped out or that people maybe don’t know so much about so uh yeah we keep on top of that and it really is uh almost a full-time job doing that if you haven’t already by the way you do need to check out the safe cycle London map

Which I also always Link in the description below the video um it’s a fantastic resource and I definitely wouldn’t be able to do the videos without it or something very very like it so yeah big shout out to that map make sure that you get there the next question is also from

David Shepard and he asks how do you remember the roots yeah so that’s a good question the short answer is that I write them down I put them in the notes app on my phone whenever I go out on a ride to film and I have my own sort of

Short hand or tablature which I can put them in and the reason I do it like that is because they have to be short concise and really easy to read but also really accurate um so that if I’m say stopped at lights or whatever and I forget which

Way I need to go I can just glance at my notes that really quickly and uh get back on it without having to uh to pause get off or do a major cut or anything like that I could use a digital map and obviously I make maps for all the roots

But I actually tend to make the map when I’m editing up the video rather than for my own ride um that’s kind of because I quite like learning the streets and how they all connect up I mean it’s really useful for the channel and the way I think of it is

That you know knowledge about London is always going to be useful unless the city’s somehow wiped off the map or whatever so you know once you’ve learned that knowledge it’s going to be just handy and uh yeah I think not having a map and just trying to remember which

Way to go and only checking when you really can’t remember is just a good way to uh to build that knowledge up before I go out on rides as well I do usually check in Google Street View what um sort of various maybe more complicated bits

Of the route look like and I try and remember those in my head you can’t see every bit though so there is a little bit of trial and error um I do occasionally make a wrong turn have to go back and cut it um as I did in the uh

The recently Bridge roundabout video you probably saw but it’s pretty rare so uh next question Nico 2020 asks what camera do you use So currently I use a GoPro Hero 11 black which is fantastic um this footage was actually shot on a GoPro Hero 8 black which I used before I had

The hero 11 and before that on the very very earliest few videos I used a nobrand 20 quid camera from eBay or Amazon or something like that um I very quickly realized when I was going to do the Channel that I needed image stabilization which is why I bought the

Hero 8 and as you can see it looks really good I then upgraded to to the hero 11 because I wanted to shoot in 4k but also to keep it in 60 frames per second as because I’m slowing the videos down there’s a lot of motion I just

Think it looks better in 60 frames per second than it does in 30 um I did do a couple of videos in 4k with 30fps and it didn’t look quite right so you get that kind of smooth look with also the higher quality um fortunately thanks to everyone on the patreon you’re all

Legends by the way thanks so much I was able to upgrade the camera and just do that and I’m keeping an eye on new camera releases and I feel like it’s worth upgrading the camera to improve the image quality whenever I can really and since people are paying me to do

This um that’s one of the things that I would spend the money on so yeah uh May upgrade in the future but I’m really happy with the hero 11 it’s really really good and I recommend it to everyone I also have um some other gear

That I use so I have a uh a charging case which can hold three spare GoPro batteries and have four batteries in total so that’s useful for going out on these long rides where I shoot like six or seven um different videos on a single

Day I can I can generally get one video out of a battery sometimes a bit more but what I do is I also daisy chain the uh the three battery case with uh just a sort of a power brick that you might use for a phone and so I’m charging up the

Battery that I’ve already run down in my backpack while I’m cycling around doing the videos and generally it means that I can pretty much go um all day and uh you know shoot six seven whatever videos uh it’s probably really bad for both batteries and possibly a fire risk but

Yeah it’s okay next question trissy babes asks what bike did you have stolen and what did you replace it with good memory I did have my bike stolen and it was horrible I previously had a red 2013 specialized La that I bought when I moved to London in 2012 um they released

The bike a year earlier and I replaced it with an older bike actually it’s a 2003 leemond Nevada city which is also kind of a road bike but it’s actually made of steel um which was a good compromise for me because I wanted a bike that I could have a sturdy luggage

Rack on the back of with a seat for my son and actually the LA wasn’t good for that it’s made of aluminium lot softer not as rigid weirdly I actually found my old bike for sale on Facebook Marketplace and I was going to go around

And just get it to be honest but I made the mistake of telling the police and they said don’t go uh we’ll sort it out and then they didn’t sort it out and they called me and said we’ve not been able to sort it out just as it was taken

Down so I do wonder if they were ever going to sort it out uh similar question from rubbish gimpy who asked how many bikes do you own um it’s just that one I only have one I only really have space for one um kind of tempted by e bike or a cargo

Bike but I they’re very pricey and I don’t really have space for a cargo bike or anywhere to lock it so um yeah maybe when my kids a little bit older I am sometimes tempted by more of a sort of a Dutch bike you know less Road geometry

More just sort of poing along but honestly you can just do that on a road bike um I don’t cycle particularly fast I don’t race uh but it’s nice having a light bike you know where you need to Lug it up steps or anything like that so

In the end a steel road bike was what I went for but not dogmatic about it you know ride whatever you like I think next question is one that a lot of people ask um and it’s can you overlay a map on the videos uh showing your live progress so

I have looked into this cuz people do ask for it a lot and when I sat down and thought about what I might need to do to make it work the issue that I immediately ran into was either the map is so small that it’s not useful you

Can’t get things like legible street names on there or it so big that it takes up a huge part of the screen and would probably interfere with people’s enjoyment of the videos so I have for now decided against it um that’s partly because I think you can just follow

Along on the Kut map which is in the link you know uh if it’s really helpful but uh yeah so for now I think logistically it doesn’t work although it is a really nice idea and I can totally see why people are asking for it the

Next question is from Ed Hatley who asks what is your favorite low trffic neighborhood in London that’s a really difficult question because there are so many really nice ones I think if pushed I’d probably say the Railton low traffic neighborhood in Lambeth um and for the reason that it connects two Town centers

Just by filtering rton road so it connect brickton all the way down to Hearn Hill and you’ve got this brilliant Corridor that people use and whenever you go down there particularly when it’s sunny but honestly all the time there’s always people cycling so it’s had a huge sort of modal shift effect

Um and you know that’s that’s what it’s all about really letting people cycle when they want to the next question is from Dorset tyk who asks is there a direct correlation between the wealth of a London burrow and its cycle infrastructure that is a super interesting question and probably one

That you’d want to do an academic study on rather than ask me but I think the answer is probably no with a bit of a caveat if you look at say um Kensington and Chelsea it’s the richest burer or one of the richest bers and it has the

Worst cycle infrastructure for an in London burrow but the council running Tower hamlets which is one of the poorest bars in London maybe even the poorest I’m not sure is also pretty bad it also depends how you define wealth whether or not you’re just talking about housing wealth which might be a bit

Different to income so if I had to come down on one side or the other I’d say it probably wasn’t the deciding factor hit hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy 69 asks could you follow the super Loop bus routes on your bike as videos yeah that’s an interesting idea um I have

Toed with the idea of doing more novelty videos or slightly different videos that aren’t like the normal roots on this channel um the main reason I haven’t is honestly just time um and I like doing the main routs as well people seem to like them um if I do get time in the

Future that might be one that I give a go to a couple of people asked have I cycled in cities around the world and which do I find the most impressive I cycled in a few um I used to live in Brussels and I cycled there and it’s all

Right it’s probably about as good as London maybe a little bit better in some respects in other respects not quite so good they’re a little bit better at building uh py more cycle Lanes I think but they haven’t really gone for modal filtering and some of the back streets

Are still a bit hairy um I’ve also cycled in Paris on holiday a little bit and you know everyone knows Paris has done fantastic Leaps and Bounds in recent years I think they’re definitely ahead of London now um some of the infrastructure there is a little bit um

Rudimentary especially away from the uh the sort of main tourist areas like Rue riverly is amazing it’s not all as good as that but frankly yeah they’re doing a great job I’ve also cycled in Rotterdam on holiday we rented bikes there and goes without saying it was the best the

Netherlands just gets basically everything right you could just point your bike in the direction you wanted to go cycle no issues and I think that should really be the aim in London one day similarly Tom Chamberlin asks would you review bike lanes and ltns in other

Cities yeah sure that could be fun um you know as special one-offs um I’d quite like to check out Manchester Birmingham and Leicester it wouldn’t be quite the same format as I’m not really knowledgeable about those cities but I’m always open to things like that it’s really just a question of having the

Time to do it gelain asks uh why is coverage in Northwest London so Spar kind of touched on that earlier it’s CU there just isn’t really the infrastructure there for me to do roots of a video quality where I feel happy sort of sending people that way there should be some more infrastructure

Coming online there in the next year or so and when that opens I’ll definitely be doing that so do hit subscribe if you’re interested in that kind of stuff I do have this Dilemma on the channel where I’m constantly trying to balance between showing off the best stuff and

Showing what you can do without worrying to obviously tackling routes that people want to do which will often be where there isn’t much infrastructure and they’ve not been able to work out a route for themselves um and yeah Northwest London is sometimes a casualty of that as it does sometimes fall on the

Wrong side of that line rack 47 asks a really good question which is you’re very law abiding in your videos when the camera’s off do you ever go ahead of a red light mount a pavement Etc so very early on doing this channel I realized that if you make even a tiny mistake

People tend to point it out in the comments so I resolved to not deliberately ever break any rules as a result I think doing this channel has actually made me a more compliant Rider even when the cameras aren’t rolling uh just out of habit now do I never break

Any rules no but I do believe what I say in the videos in particular about pedestrians um I do think that when you’re on a bike you do have a genuine responsibility not to endanger upset or otherwise scare pedestrians so I definitely do my utmost not to break any

Rules that did that I am significantly less worried about people in cars so uh yeah that’s probably the the basic framework that we’re working with there the next question comes from Heather glass hi Heather and she asks if you were mayor of London for a day what would you do

So this is a difficult one to give an answer to beyond the obvious that’s just build more cycle Lanes do more ltns and tame traffic but I think there are a couple of quite specific things that sadic Khan’s not currently doing um that he should do rather than just things

That he is doing that I’d like him to do more of or better one big thing that I think is missing at the moment is actually something on road user charging we’ve got ues but that only affects really small number of polluting cars that are basically going to go away soon

But once those cars have basically been phased out then there’s really going to be no charge or disincentive to drive short Journeys in London and uh I think we do need to basically properly price the costs of traffic and congestion um in this city otherwise people will just

Choose to drive um there is obviously the congestion charge in central London but that covers a relatively small area so you could either expand it or you could have some sort of new system that basically uh charge people depending on how much they drove um these are things

That have been talked about by economists and environmental campaigners for ages and I’m not qualified to say what exactly the best way of doing it would be but yeah some way of just pricing congestion and charging people who create it would be a good thing I think that’s not just because congestion

And traffic is bad in it self and has huge environmental and health effects on the people who it affects but I think that there’s also a sort of a political point to it which is that whenever we see schemes brought forward for cycling uh or when we don’t see schemes brought

Forward for cycling that should be brought forward one of the reasons there is often that oh this scheme would reduce Road capacity by too much we can’t remodel this Junction to be safe because there isn’t enough Road capacity and it would slow down the buses or or

You know we can’t introduce this LTM because it would divert traffic and there isn’t enough Road capacity and ultimately if there’s not enough Road capacity that means that either you have to build more rows which would mean bulldozing large parts of Central London or in London which just isn’t going to

Happen or you have to reduce the number of cars and you know in economics the way to reduce the amount of something is to charge it higher price or to tax it as we can do in this case so uh I I think that making the city safer for

Walking and cycling and to get around you’ve got to do something to just reduce the general levels of traffic so that when traffic authorities like tfl or councils take decisions about the way that roads are built they do it from this assumption that traffic is actually

Going to be at a lower base than it currently is and uh they’re not put off making the changes that need to be made um unfortunately uh sadik KH the current mayor has I think ruled out doing anything on that after the backlash on ues and I think that’s a real shame

Because it is a really key and important uh thing that needs to be solved if we can make progress in other areas that leads on quite nicely to the next question which is from Lord Gemini and Lord Gemini asks does the London burrow system where you’ve got a mayor and then

32 Burrows make it more difficult to deliver cycling infrastructure could the mayor of Paris an do stuff that has been delivered in London at the moment is being delivered by burrowers they are particularly ambitious on things like low traffic neighborhoods but for example if you look at things like protected Junctions

Weal and Forest is doing those uh they’re doing those sort of Cyclops or Dutch protected style Junctions where tfl hasn’t built any of them now you might just say well tfl should just build them but actually in practice often the way that these things work is that they need work through examples

Already before Engineers feel confident and before politicians feel confident at signing off schemes that haven’t been tried elsewhere in the UK so having these different barers competing with each other to an extent or trying new things it it does have a positive side as well would anel dgo be able to do

What she did in Paris in London no she wouldn’t because the control isn’t from the center but would an incredibly anti-cling may be able to rip out all the cycle Lanes in London if they got in no wouldn’t either because they would still be good bers on balance that can

Be incredibly frustrating and particularly when it comes to transport and you just need a proper Network connecting things up yeah I’d say on balance there is a problem and uh what’s required there is for the national government just to get on side and to I think you know take High Street

Kensington off of uh of RA bar of Kensington and Chelsea and such like that but I do think that the centralization of power comes with as many risks as it does rewards in this case and you know it’s not necessarily a good thing just because you can point to

Example of people using it for good can also be used for ill or you know if tfl controlled all the roads and was simply ambivalent about doing stuff on cycling as it has been in the not too distant past then nothing would get done so do I

Think that there are things about the political system that need fixing or tweaking absolutely do I think that we need to throw out the b system actually no I don’t think that we do I think bers do come with upsides as well now Henry reeman asks what is the best

Way to campaign for cycle infrastructure in your local area and Mr Jared Harris also asks how do you get an ltn in your local area he’s already tried speaking to his counselor who said that they consulted on one in 2019 but it was rejected as there wasn’t an appetite for

It um I’ll sort of take these two questions together the first thing that I’ll say is that I’m not a campaigner I don’t really know or have much experience on the how to do this so I might not be the best person to ask but my main suggestion would be simply to

Organize get involved with local groups um so two groups that you might consider check your local area to see which one’s the most active or you could just join both the London cycling campaign potentially has local groups and has a lot of campaigning power and living streets is also another one with local

Groups there are also uh other local groups um often they call things like you know livable whatever or better streets for whatever area I would suggest getting in touch with those guys Twitter is often a good starting points sometimes they have mailing lists and use them as a space to meet like-minded

People and just make sure that your ideas are reflected and you’ll probably find that a lot of people um also feel the same in your local area and uh you guys can talk about how best to convince local leaders counselors to do that um in the case of uh bars where

Is not necessarily uh on board I would also suggest get maybe getting in touch with the local Cabinet member who’s in charge of Transport as they will often be the ones actually making the decisions and it’s good to put stuff on their radar as well although as I say

I’m not an expert in campaigning it’s not something that I have a huge amount of experience doing so if this is a question where people want to pitch in in the comments with their own ideas then that might be helpful now if you’re still with me then well done uh I’m

Going to do the last question and it’s from Urban nerd and they ask what do you make of the change in London’s cycle infrastructure in the last 10 years the way I always think about this is that when I started cycling in London in 2012 you could usually pick a route to where

You needed to go that while not great avoided the very worst roads it was possible if you were prepared to make some compromises now in most parts of London there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to make the same Journey with significant stretches of that on genuinely good infrastructure and if

You’re lucky you might be able to go the whole way but however you look at it it’s been a huge Improvement it’s not quite there yet but it’s genuinely unrecognizable from how it was 10 years ago when it comes to cycling I’d say the two major Milestones were firstly Boris

Johnson’s last term where he constructed the north south cycle super highway or CS6 as we call it um and the East West one along the embankment CS3 um those were genuine game changers and they proved what could be done the second big milestone was during and after the co

Pandemic where there was just a huge uptick in ambition particularly from burrowers um and particularly on delivery of things like low traffic neighborhoods before those two things happened I don’t think I’d be able to run this channel there just wouldn’t be any good routs but now there are new

Good things opening all the time and yeah it feels like a really exciting time to be watching this stuff in London is it sometimes frustrating yeah I often wish we could go a lot faster and do things better and I talk about that in the videos it’s often uneven as well

There are some barers that are just bad and some bers that are actively hostile but yeah things have definitely improved and I think the evidence for that is in the footage you’re watching now and in the footage that you can watch on this channel pretty much every week where

There’s just so many more people riding bikes around the city and you know they are comfortable doing so and they are doing that because the environment for cycling in London has genuinely improved there are a lot of exciting schemes in the pipeline both tfl and bur schemes um

And yeah I think we’re going to be seeing more after the maral election so make sure you hit subscribe on the channel cuz I always go and check out the new infrastructure I always show off what Roots you can do and uh yeah do leave me a like if you enjoyed this

Video it’s been a pretty wide- ranging chat thank you to everyone on the patreon if anyone else wants to support the channel you can find a link in the description below the video and uh normal service will resume next week I will see you guys in the comments goodbye