In The City of London Bicycles Now Outnumber Cars

Streetfilms in London was there when the news broke that latest counts show there are now MORE bikes than cars in the City of London! Yes, that is a relatively small section of the entire city, but it is significant. Everywhere you go in London you see people on bikes, and every visit I return I can’t believe how many more bike riders there are.

Essentially, the city is really becoming a cycling mecca. But the story of the amazingly wide separated bike lanes (previously called cycle superhighways) is not the only story why biking is so good there. Low Traffic Neighborhoods are being installed all over London and once you eliminate all the thru traffic (they call that rat running) you’ll find the streets so calm, so peaceful and less polluted with sound and pollution, that you don’t need lanes everywhere to have a great cycle network!

There’s a bit of a revolution going on in London in the business districts is that more bikes on the street during rush hour than cars for the first time ever which is amazing. It has changed so much over the years. I know when I was a lot younger there wasn’t a lot of cycle lanes but now you’ve seen cycling everywhere. It’s just become such a cycling friendly city. Before it was places like Holland, Amsterdam and now I mean here it’s just incredible. I go everywhere in London uh on my bike. It is by far the most efficient, cheap, and enjoyable way to travel. It’s much faster, cheaper than the tube or the bus. And definitely going anywhere by car when you hit quiet streets and it’s just you and cycle. It’s pretty cool. It’s good. It’s good to see more people on the road. My colleagues know when I’ve ridden to work cuz I’m much more smiley. And they also know when I’ve come on public transport like the tube or the train cuz I’m that not a bad experience. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I think 20 minutes, you know, let me have a cup of tea and calm down. But when I’m riding, I’m like, “Hi everybody, you know, it’s going to be a great day.” I’m way more upbeat. So, the change that’s happened in the city of London is astonishing. Now, City of London, for people who don’t know, is really the center of the financial district. Um, we’ve seen a 56% increase in cycling in the last 2 years. That’s up 70% uh since I think 2017. It’s astonishing. If you go down there, you will see bikes everywhere. More bikes than cars actually at the in the morning rush hours and the evening peak. All those cyclists are coming in using our new and expanding network, coming into London, coming into work and uh and reducing emissions, making it healthier, making it a better city. We have more journeys starting and ending in Hackne by bike than any other burough in London. So cycling is huge here. That might be partly because it’s very flat. It’s great to cycle, but also we’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and and funding of course, really putting in cycling infrastructure, encouraging cycling, encouraging active travel more generally. Our council has put in a lot of uh traffic filters against motor traffic, created a lot of low traffic neighborhoods which has really really helped with encouraging people to walk and cycle. One amazing benefit of low traffic neighborhoods is that basically every street in them becomes a really comfortable wide cycle route. I think there’s a there’s a misapprehension often that we need to build cycle lanes, cycle tracks everywhere. And actually often the solution is a low traffic neighborhood. Take out the through traffic and you immediately create a really comfortable uh environment to cycle like where you can ride together like we are here side to side. We don’t need a car and we can cycle like pretty much anywhere in Hackne because of the low traffic neighborhoods. when there were no bicycle lanes. I’ve always been more keen on taking like side roads and I don’t mind adding 10 minute 15 minutes onto my ride if it means it’s a more enjoyable ride and less traffic. Okay, so here we’re at the boundary road between two low traffic neighborhoods. And so what was done here is that you actually have a modal filter on both sides of the road and you have the boundary road but a cyclist priority crossing. So what that means is you can be cycling in a low traffic neighborhood uh like here and then you just cross over uh the boundary road with the crossing and then you continue on your way. This is a relatively new design uh where drivers always have to give way or yield to cyclists. So there’ll be some areas where like cars can’t cross but bikes can and that those kind of streets those kind of streets make all the difference. The majority of the neighborhoods in Hackne are covered with low traffic neighborhoods. And it just makes it a lot easier to get around because we’re going through the neighborhoods. We don’t have cars overtaking us. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] London is changing. You know, we’ve I think when I started this job, there were about 650,000 daily journeys. Now we’re over 1.33 million every single day. And I think one of the key things that’s changed is the expansion of the cycle network. We’ve gone from 90 km of bike lane to 410 I think at the moment. That’s that’s a bigger bike network than there is the tube network. So between 530 and 630 is the peak PM flow. It’s great to be cycling in numbers. I think it makes you feel safer and uh the cars are more aware of their surroundings when there’s more cyclists on the road. I like the embankment like along the riverside because that um cycling goes on for miles and miles and it’s really nice. Firms are actually trying to encourage uh people to cycle to work. I think because they know that uh people that cycle to work are much more productive. There’s two things. The first is the political leadership. the mayor of London has made it a political and economic priority for him to invest in safe cipher. And secondly, what we’ve seen is that people are shifting the way that they get around. More than 50% of young people use a line bike at least once a week here in London. And what we’re seeing is, you know, 33% of our users have never cycled before until they tried us. So, what we’re seeing is that shift. Line bicycles have also transformed the way people move around because it’s so convenient. You don’t have to own a bike. You can just jump onto one. It really has got a lot more people cycling. So that’s another bit of the cultural aspect. If you got an electric bike, you can definitely do a lot more mileage than you could without it. 100%. And it definitely opens up doors for people who are maybe less mobile. [Music] Riding through the city with everybody is exciting. It’s empowering. Um, we’ve seen a real, you know, shift in the kind of demographics using it, but we’re still not at a place where we need to be. We still don’t have a 50/50 mode share, male, female. We really need to continue this journey of delivering ambitious, highquality cycling infrastructure to ensure that we get more vulnerable road users out on their bicycles. That although women make up 51% of London’s population, they only make a third of the cycling journeys. And we wanted to know why. So our first report followed a survey of about a thousand women who all came on a big ride with us. We called it the freedom ride and we ended up with three main recommendations. One, proper segregated cycling infrastructure, not paint. Paint doesn’t protect. We want them to be joined up. There’s no point in having a beautiful segregated route that then throws you out into the traffic at the other end. So we want them to be joined up. And the third thing was social safety. When women are on their bikes, they seem to attract a huge amount of gendered abuse by male, usually male car drivers, close passes, cat calling. London’s great to cycle in. It’s really compact. It’s an old Victorian city. You can get from one end to the other, but it still has too much motor traffic. It’s just, you know, the old Victorian streets are taken up with car parking on both sides of the road. So it’s very it it looks unsightly and then there’s so much motor traffic still around and drivers who are not considerate. But we have really led on school streets. We’ve got 34 school streets. A school street is a street that is closed to passing through traffic in at the beginning of the school day and at the end of the school day. So children and their parents, families can move in that space without stress without the stress of fastmoving traffic. The real solution to many many problems is to limit the use of cars in terms of mental and physical health, joy, cheap transport. The bike is such a silver bullet for so many different things. The change over the last sort of like five or six years has been like very significant. Like I hardly ever saw any women riders, never mind brown women riders. But now like I’m beep beeping and ding dinging all the time. When I started cycling, I felt like I was the only Muslim or the only one that had a head cycling around until I went on social media and found all these different groups, you know, all different type of women on B. I think, oh wow, okay, so I need to start getting into these groups and meet other women. I absolutely love it. Feels like safety in numbers. Sometimes to me it feels like we’re like a flock of birds or something or like feels really sort of liberating. You’re waiting at the traffic lights or you’re cycling to work and there’s like four or five people pulling up next to you on a line bike. It really has changed uh the way people get around. It’s changed the city and you can see it and that’s a fun job. You know what I love the most is when I see kids cycling to school. Yeah. On roads that they wouldn’t have parents wouldn’t have dreamt of letting their kids go on there. But when you see kids cycling school or back from school, that gives you such a glow of pride in all the hard work the teams have delivered across London because that’s the future. If kids start that they’re cycling around as part of their journey at the early stage, they’ll carry on. They’ll keep that habit for life. And that means that we’ve got generations of Londoners embracing the bike and enjoying cycling about. [Music]