🚲 London tube strike cycling boom: Knightsbridge to Bank in rush hour

You can cycle from Knightsbridge in west central London to Bank in east central London entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 6.3km long (3.9 miles) and makes use of Cycleway 3 and quiet filtered streets around Bank.

If you find this video useful or you just enjoy watching it please remember to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon so you’re alerted to new videos, as I try to post new ones like it every week.

And if you like what the channel is doing and want to support it, you can also contribute to the London Cycle Routes Patreon below. It really helps keep the channel going:

http://patreon.com/londoncycleroutes

You can see a digital map of the route and download a GPS/GPX file to use on whatever device or app you want here:

https://www.komoot.com/tour/2566651472?share_token=aRykrFgzxvY81kZc0IGRo2kFrDmTzM9O4ESPA3NxKeaHlg0PaP&ref=wtd

And you can find a viewer-created and maintained map of all the London Cycle Routes videos here:

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

I also highly recommend the Safe Cycle London map for route planning, which is compiled by @SafeCycleLDN on twitter:

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

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Routes. Today we’ll be riding from Nightsbridge in West Central London to Bank in East Central London. This video was filmed at rush hour during the 2025 Tube Strike and we’re going to see a staggering number of people riding their bikes through central London. The ride takes around 25 minutes and the whole thing is on protected cycle lanes. By public transport, this journey usually takes around 25 minutes, too, with a change of line. Though, on the day of the strike itself, it was looking more like an hour if you were lucky. So, it’s no wonder that lots of people jumped on their bikes. If you find this video useful or you just enjoy watching it, then please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel as I try to post new videos just like it every week. I’d also like to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. If you’d like to contribute, too, then you can find a link in the description below the video. All right, let’s get going. So, we’re starting near Nightsbridge Tube Station and we’re going to use this crossing over the road into Hyde Park’s Albert Gate, which takes us onto the South Carriage Drive. London’s rush hour is these days always really busy with people cycling, but today was the busiest I’ve seen it by quite a way. Some of the scenes as we get further into central London will be verging on ridiculous and I think it poses some interesting questions which we’ll be answering or at least asking later. There’s always an increase in cycling during tube strikes, but I think it’s right to say that this is the first allout sustained strike that we’ve had since cycling really took off in this city with lots of infrastructure going in since the pandemic. So, it’s definitely the first time that we’ve seen this volume of people ride in all at once. Immediately, you can see that we’re actually bumping up against the limits of the infrastructure here with the volume of people using it. This crossing at High Park Corner is over capacity at the best of times, but today it feels like something out of the Battle of Hastings. The design where the crossing is shared with pedestrians isn’t ideal, and really, you want to separate people on bikes and people walking there. I’m not sure I’d want to walk across that crossing, although I do always love sailing under the Wellington Arch here on my bike with a palaton of other people. I think it’s interesting to talk about where all these extra people on bikes are coming from. It’s worth saying that they’re not all necessarily new to cycling. I often cycle to work, but I don’t do it every day. And I think that’s probably true for a lot of people. In this city, you have a lot of options. So when cycling becomes the only good option for everyone all at once, everyone who rides a bike sometimes decides to do it on the same day and you end up with this. On top of that, in London these days, there are more people than ever who cycle occasionally thanks to the boom in higher bikes, mostly dockless ebikes. That means a lot of people have experience of riding a bike in the city and all of a sudden they consider it an option for journeys when previously they might not have. You can definitely see a lot of Lime bikes in the crowds here throughout the video if you keep an eye out, but it’s also backed up by data. Lime says it’s had a 74% increase in journeys during the rush hour. TFL Santandere Boris bikes are up 72% and Forest, another higher bike company, claims that they’re up 300%. You don’t have to necessarily believe those numbers exactly to see that there’s clearly something going on. That said, anecdotally, I’ve also heard about people installing higher bike caps for the first time or getting their old bikes out of the shed. On this ride, too, I definitely got the impression that some people who I passed did seem to be quite new to riding a bike in central London as well. Just my impression. If you’re watching this and you rode in to work for the first time during the strike, do let me know in the comments. I’d be really interested to hear what you made of it. And I promise it’s usually a little bit less busy, so do stick with it. Not just less busy in terms of bikes, but also definitely in terms of road traffic. There were of course a lot of people choosing to drive into central London, probably quite unwisely, as it didn’t look like they were having quite as much fun as the people on the bikes. I do hope that people who tried riding in for the first time this week do keep it up, and I’m sure that some will. I once saw an analysis of tube strike data which suggested that during strikes a small percentage of people who take a different route to work to avoid disruption whether that’s a different line or using the bus or something actually never go back to their old route and the explanation for that is seemingly because they realize that the route that they tried is actually better than the way they were doing it. I’d imagine that would be the case for some people who try riding a bike in. I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks, though. It could be difficult to disentangle the effect from the ever growing number of people riding bikes in this city. Anyway, there’s certainly no shortage of cycle growth here. As long as the infrastructure keeps improving, I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. We’re now entering Parliament Square, which is always busy with people on bikes every day thanks to its central location, its protected cycle lanes, and the fact that it’s the intersection of a number of different bike routes. Today it’s absolutely rammed, particularly when we cross this next set of lights and go past Big Ben and then we try and turn left onto the embankment cycle way, which is going to take us towards the city of London and Bank, which is our final destination. There’s pretty much an endless queue of people cycling in both directions, sometimes to a breast, and it’s a stream of people that just doesn’t stop coming. The wait to turn left towards the embankment here is usually pretty long due to the light phasing, but on this occasion, we actually weren’t able to get everyone through the lights on the first phase, and I had to wait for a second light phase, which we just about managed to squeeze through on. This isn’t the only place on this route that let that happen, by the way. I’ll flag the other one when we get there. It’s a sign that the infrastructure is massively over capacity, and we can talk about that in more detail in a moment. Just a note that I normally cut out the weights at traffic lights in my videos on this channel, but in this case of the weight here, I actually decided to leave most of it in so that you could see firstly that we didn’t get through on the first phase and then the endless stream of people on bikes coming past as we waited. When the light is red here, most of these people are coming straight on northbound over Westminster Bridge. And when the light turns green, they are coming from the embankment cycle way. You can’t see it in this video too, but there’s also an ever growing queue of people behind us. We’re pretty near the front. Many cycle routes in London are tidal, so more people will be traveling in one direction than the other at certain times of day because of the direction of the rush hour. But that isn’t really the case at Parliament Square because it’s so central and an intersection of all these different routes. It’s busy in both directions no matter when you come. And yes, I did just turn the background sound up there for a second so that you could hear Big Ben bonging. Now, I absolutely think it’s fantastic to see all these people out on bikes, and it’s a really positive development. But one question that keeps popping up here in this video is capacity. Not necessarily on the cycle lanes themselves. You can see here that we’re passing by relatively efficiently. It’s usually at junctions, which are pinch points where we have serious issues. In the short term, I think it makes sense to do what you can to make sure that traffic light timings are appropriate. I really don’t think they are at that junction next to Big Ben, for example. But in the longer term, I think the solution has to be more infrastructure. While there’s obviously an unusual number of people cycling today, it’s not going to be unusual forever. The difference between a normal day of people cycling in central London in 2025 and the day this was filmed during the strike is probably proportionally less than the difference between the number of people you would have seen say 10 or 15 years ago riding a bike in central London and a normal day in 2025. So, if cycling keeps on growing, in a way, today is quite a good trial run to stress test the infrastructure that we’re probably going to need in the future. Don’t get me wrong, the infrastructure is holding up pretty admirably, but there are clearly some things that need to be addressed here. The answer’s got to be more routes in central London. The embankment and Parliament Square aren’t necessarily the most direct routes for everyone on them. They’re just the highest quality infrastructure. So people deliberately divert this way to use it so they can feel safe and comfortable when they ride to work. And the result is that particularly at junctions, they end up over capacity. But if there were more highquality parallel routes of the same quality, then you wouldn’t get these pinch points because people would be spread across a number of different routes. An obvious nearby candidate is Fleet Street, The Strand, and the Mall, which run parallel here, but which currently most people avoid most of on a bike. Another just further north is Shaftsbury Avenue and Piccadilly, which makes sense, too. And Camden Council is already planning lanes on their part there. Westminster Council should step up. It’s crucial that new infrastructure has onward connections to other parts of the network, too, which is the reason that the embankment is such a useful route. Of course, more infrastructure will probably in itself induce more demand just as when you build, say, a new rail line or a new motorway. But when it comes to cycling, that’s a good thing as it’s such an efficient mode of travel. Just imagine if every single person that we’d passed in this video today decided to drive into London during the tube strike, as a lot more people used to do during events like this. It would be complete gridlock and nobody would be getting anywhere. Just a quick note for anyone who is new to the channel, please do hit subscribe on YouTube. I do videos every week, mostly showing off new infrastructure around London and documenting ways to get around the city on quiet streets and protected lanes without dealing with traffic. So, if that appeals, you’ll like the channel and should subscribe. If you like this video specifically, please do leave a like to help other people find it. It really does boost it in YouTube’s algorithm. And for regular viewers, I’m sorry I didn’t publish a video for the last two weeks for the first time in a very long while because my computer was in the shop getting fixed. So, apologies for that. I’d also like to say a huge thanks to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. If anyone else wants to help support what we’re doing here and throw money at me, then you can find a link in the description below the video to the Patreon where you can do so. Now, we’re heading to Bank today, and my favorite way to do that from cycleway 3, which we’re on now, is to turn off left in a minute and head up Queen Street, which is mostly traffic free. One little thing about all the higher bikes you see around is that they actually have to be moved around by van. And you can see one of the vans for the Santandere Cycles just up here on the left doing its best to move those bikes around for people. And on the right up here, you can see absolutely loads of line bikes. And on the left, tons and tons and tons of Santandere, TfL, Boris bikes, whatever you prefer to call them. I desperately wanted to get out and get some footage of rush hour during the strike to make this video, but it was touch and go as to whether I’d be able to, as the day I could get out and film, it was looking like it was going to rain. There’s nothing wrong with cycling in the rain, but I can’t film in the rain because even a couple of drops on the camera lens tends to make the footage basically unusable. From the moment I set out to night through the whole video, I was absolutely convinced it was going to start raining as the forecast said it was going to, but I braved it anyway because I thought it was going to be so cool and I wanted to document it. And I’m glad I did because the weather held off until literally the moment I arrived at bank when the heavens absolutely opened and I got totally drenched. But I was perfectly happy because I got this great footage. Funnily enough, I think that the other days during strike week when the weather was sunnier were probably if anything a little busier as forecast rain does tend to have a small effect on the number of people traveling by bike. So, if anything, this footage understates the scene, but it’s pretty rammed anyway, so I’m happy that we got to document it. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Please do hit subscribe if you haven’t already so that my videos appear on your homepage. I usually release them every Sunday evening. And do leave a like on YouTube to help others find this video. It really does boost it in the algorithm. I am really interested in hearing about your strike day cycling experiences. If you did so, let me know in the comments below and let me know what you think of this video, too. I will see some of you below the line in the comments. And the rest of you, I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for watching and goodbye.