Two years have now passed since London's cycling "czar", Andrew Gilligan, told the world that his city was 40 years behind Amsterdam.

London's mayor, Boris Johnson, has now been in power for more time than it took to transform the entirety of the Netherlands for cycling, with no substantial progress occurring under his time in office. London's record on achieving press coverage is phenomenal. There has been a lot of noise made in London about cycling. Unfortunately, actual building of well-designed infrastructure is another thing altogether.

According to London's plans from two years ago, the peak year of expenditure is 2015. Yes, this is it. What does not get done in 2015 has less chance of being done later. This is the year when expenditure on cycling reaches its peak of £18 per person per year. That's about 2/3 of the usual Dutch level of expenditure. For the other years of the plan the expenditure level will be less than £10 per person per year, under 1/3 of the Dutch level. As I pointed out two years ago, the plans simply were not ambitious enough. London can never 'catch up' with the Netherlands by spending only a third as much for a limited period of time. Perhaps this is why the target in London is for a mere 5% of journeys to be made by bike.

A selection of proposals from last year
Sadly, proposals for new infrastructure in London remain inadequate. Here are a selection of those which I've seen over the last year.

Dangerous central cycle-lane leading into advanced stop boxes (including one in the fourth lane over). That's not cycling infrastructure, it's yet more paint.

How many lanes and places to cross ? Why ? This proposal was praised in some quarters as at least including some segregation of modes. What it actually does is demonstrate that the designers don't understand that bicycles are not the same as cars. Cyclists don't need extra traffic lights which apply only to them, they should be able to avoid traffic lights in order to make cycling journeys faster.

"Gobsmackingly bonkers". More ASLs, on-road lanes and the addition of a cycle-path which for some reason goes straight through the middle of a roundabout. Safe roundabouts for cyclists look entirely different to this idea.

The "cycle waiting bay". A bizarre idea. How many people actually want special places where they can wait beside the road before continuing their journey rather than infrastructure which allows them to complete their journeys both safely and efficiently ?

'Advanced' lights, on-road lanes, multi-colour cycling facilties, dangerous multi-stage turns.

Update May 2015: One that I'd missed which is so awful in design that it really must be listed here. A redesign for Queen's Circus Battersea roundabout which is actually under construction. In some places this has been described as "Dutch", but it's very far from any real design for a Dutch roundabout. This junction is also far too busy for a Dutch roundabout design so in the Netherlands this junction would in fact use traffic lights instead. As we can see form the photo, traffic lights are actually installed, so this won't flow freely like a roundabout. I'm assured that the cycling infrastructure under construction is actually narrower than that shown in the picture. Update July 2015: Watch a video which demonstrates this roundabout in action. Enormously long delays for cyclists, combined with red jumping by drivers which puts cyclists in danger even after they've waited for a green light.

The ludicrous ideas

London's "Skycycle". It doesn't actually exist of course and hopefully never will because this is neither convenient nor affordable.

Of course we've not only seen lacklustre plans like those above, but also completely preposterous ideas. Cycle paths were proposed both in the sky and below ground, both of course far more expensive and less convenient places to put cycling infrastructure than where sensible people have been requesting it - ground level.

But why stop there ? The Bounceway offered the intriguing idea of trampolining to work, backed by a grant from Transport for London to a company which went bankrupt shortly afterwards.

There was also a proposal for a bridge full of trees over the Thames which it may or may not be possible to cycle over. Update 2018: Note that this proposal, which consisted of almost nothing when I wrote the previous sentence, turned into the "Garden Bridge" project, which was cancelled without anything being built but through a fantastic degree of mismanagement still consumed 46 million pounds.

Discussing these things has wasted many hours of many peoples' time, detracting from focus on what the city should really be doing. It all demonstrates that London is still missing the big picture.

What London should really be doing
The lacklustre but serious proposals demonstrate that those working on road designs in London simply do not understand how to create good quality cycling infrastructure. The crazy ideas demonstrate something else: that those in charge don't know what to ask for.

What London needs to do now is exactly what the city has needed to do for the last 42 years:


Cycling doesn't need buzzwords. press releases, mocked up pictures which show inadequate plans or exaggerated claims. Cycling in London doesn't need people on the other side of the planet to be told about things that you might get around to doing in the future. Stop putting so much effort into trying to get good press and far too little into achieving results.

Length of headlines is far less important than length of cycle-path. The actual need of cyclists to be able to ride from wherever they live to wherever they need to go should not take a very poor second place to appearing to do the right thing to the world's press.

London has started to use the language of a grid, though they've misunderstood the intention. What is required is a very fine grid. To try again to make it clear, I'll explain how it is from my home in the Netherlands. I have to ride for just 30 seconds along 30 km/h residential streets with no through traffic (we live in a cul-de-sac - a design of street which naturally reduces through traffic) to reach either of two very high quality cycle-paths (this one and this one) which between them provide me with an efficient and safe route to every possible destination in the whole country. This is nothing special - it's normality in the Netherlands. What's more, the cycle-paths making up the majority of the grid are built to an extraordinarily high standard and maintaining the integrity of even small parts of the grid can require some surprisingly large works. This is what leads to the very high degree of subjective safety required to make cycling attractive to everyone.

Click here for details. We'd be very happy to show TfL people what is actually required in order to help to prevent them from making further mistakes

Another concept which appears to have been misunderstood on its journey across the North Sea is that of unravelling of cycling routes from driving routes. London's "Quietways" are implied to mean something similar, but the emphasis is completely wrong. Rather than cyclists having direct main routes, they are given back streets. What's more, London's "Quietways" cannot even be expected to be quiet. This simply isn't good enough to effect mass cycling.

Where cycle-paths cannot be fitted along narrow streets, unravelling removes motor traffic so that even the youngest of cyclists can get right to their destinations in the Netherlands.

We'd like to help London to do the right thing, but this is only possible if the city will let us help.
Where the money goes
2015 is to be the peak year for investment in cycling in London. However this doesn't mean that the figure of "£18 per head" allocated only for this year can be spent on new infrastructure projects in the city. It can't be spent in that way because their are already many other things for which the funds have been pre-allocated. One of the largest sinks for money is the public bike hire scheme in London.

I visited London just over a year ago Cyclists still look like this and there are good reasons why that is so.

London is building public fountains rather than providing running water to every home. One of those "fountains" is the bike share system. I've been pointing out why bike share systems are not really a solution for mass cycling since 2009.
Five years ago we discovered that London's hire bikes had already cost £23000 per bike, making them the most expensive bikes in the world. Operating costs for the system remain very high at around £24 M per year. This figure is around 1/6th of the total funding available for the peak year of 2015 and more than 1/3rd of that for other years, greatly reducing how much money is left over to spend on infrastructure which could enable everyone to cycle.

Londoners owned more than a million bikes before the bike hire scheme started. A lack of bicycles was never the reason and is still not the reason why so few journeys are made by bicycle in London. The problem was and remains a lack of truly safe places to ride a bike.

Does London have unique journeys ?

Londoners use their cars for almost  exactly the same purposes as the Dutch use their bicycles

People often imagine that their own cities have problems which don't exist in the Netherlands and that this makes it more difficult to accommodate cycling. That really does not apply to London. Londoners makes the same journeys as Dutch people, both by length of journey and for purpose. However rather than making these journeys by bicycle, Londoners use other means including the car.

Attractive, safe, go-everywhere cycling infrastructure is missing from London

Travelling by bicycle is not attractive in London now because of the conditions which people face on the streets of the city scare the masses away. We already know how to attract everyone to cycling.

There's a very good working example of what truly works a few kilometres to the East of London and I'm very happy to demonstrate it to anyone who is interested.

It's important to stop over-selling what London has done
Unfortunately, the over-selling of London doesn't only affect the UK. Hype from London spreads around the world. This leads to people in such places as Tokyo and Belgium seeing London as an inspiration - and therefore looking most firmly in the wrong direction rather than seeking to emulate best practice.

New funding announcement
Some readers may be aware that the British government announced extra funding for cycling two days ago. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, the extra funding announced is far too low a figure to make a real difference. In order to match the Dutch level of expenditure, the UK needs to spend more than £2 Billion pounds per year on cycling, but all that has been promised is £114 milion spread across four years and only available to be spent in some areas of the country.

How the DfT illustrates their funding claim. It's a long way from what Dutch children look like when they cycle.

The latest announcement follows a familiar pattern by using big and impressive sounding numbers in a way that may well confuse readers so that they think that cycling is being funded well. In reality even the largest number in the announcement ("This brought the total investment in cycling by this government to £588 million") reveals a paucity of ambition. That £588 Million spread across the five year life of the present government leaves us with British government funding for cycling which is still at a rate which is only around 1/16th of that required to match Dutch levels of expenditure. This level of funding does not represent an improvement over the early 1990s when cycle funding already hovered around one pound per person per year.

The Deputy Prime Minister claims that Britain is "in the midst of a cycling revolution". This is the sort of language which we have heard many times before, and also claims that "this money can help Britain become a cycling nation to rival the likes of Denmark and the Netherlands". It's simply not possible for Britain to begin to rival countries which are decades ahead in cycling until the government takes cycling seriously. Far from proving that the government has begun to do that, this announcement actually proves that cycling is still not being taken seriously in the UK so we should expect a continuation of cycling at a rate of around 1-2% of journeys.

You can't catch up by running slower than the people who are ahead of you. The UK's cycling decline took decades of under-investment and to make cycling normal once again requires decades of a high level of investment.

Britain last week
I was in Britain last week to visit family. While there, Sustrans called on people to celebrate 20 years of the National Cycle Network so I dutifully borrowed a bike to ride along roads which are far busier than they should be in such a small town in order to take photos.

NCN 33 wiggle onto a muddy beach. If the tide is in, what then ?, swim ? We're supposed to #celebrate20 this ?

What passes for the National Cycle Network in this part of the UK consists of several signs threatening a £500 fine to anyone who dared to ride on a wide pavement to avoid the traffic, followed by a very small and out of the way sign telling people to ride on the pavement for a short distance, and then an inconvenient wiggle down onto a beach which has mud so sticky that one of the world's very few hovercraft rescue services was established in the area to pull people out of it.

Celebrate what, precisely ? This is not the efficient go-everywhere cycling infrastructure required to get the masses to see cycling as convenient.

I also visited a new housing development which was repeating the same mistakes as other new developments in the UK. i.e.it was designed only for cars, but with the twist of providing so little space for cars that there's nowhere to park them but over the pavements. In order to convince people to use alternatives to driving, the alternative must be realistic. Carrots work better than sticks.

The same mistakes are being repeated time and time again in the UK.

Update March 22 2015
London has "quietly" abandoned the target of a 5% modal share for cycling by 2026, leaving no real target for growth at all. It's perhaps worth reflecting on what I wrote about this target two years ago:

'setting a target of only around 5% of journeys by bike is not very ambitious at all. Nowhere in the Netherlands has such a low modal share and Britain has been promised more than this before. The lack of a serious target shows that this is not a real attempt to "catch up".'

Now that even that lacklustre target has been abandoned, what now for London ?

The video below shows current cycling conditions in London. For three seconds starting at 1:06 you can actually see a brand new cycle-lane which was opened just a few days ago. Yes, it lasts just three seconds on the video. A 5% cycling modal share will remain beyond London until there are real changes to the infrastructure. No quantity of press releases and no amount of training will ever cause the population as a whole to cycle on streets which look like this:



Update July 2015
Andrew Gilligan has used the spectre of "fending off" myself and other "people like that" as an excuse not to be available to the public on social media, particularly through Twitter.

Readers may remember that I've actually offered to help London on many occasions. Invitations were first sent in 2005 before our first study tour in 2006. They were sent again, to Boris Johnson, in 2008. Since that time I've offered study tours free of charge to Boris Johnson on two occasions: Once in 2011 and then again in 2013. Note that only the second offer dates to the first offer dates back to well before Andrew Gilligan started work in London. The second free invitation was extended to him as well as to his boss, Boris Johnson.

I don't offer to work for free for no reason. I did so because I genuinely wanted to help and I did not want the cost of the tour to be in any way a reason for London not to send representatives.

We have still had no official contact with either Andrew Gilligan or Boris Johnson. Not even a proper acknowledgment of our invitation having been received. It is disappointing that Andrew prefers to try to discredit me by slighting me as he did at the Hackney Cycling Conference rather than engage with me and my genuine attempt to help London's authorities to improve conditions for the people who live in the city.

As I pointed out over a year ago, London's (and the UK in general's) lack of interest in tackling cycling is killing people. People die every day, either from their lack of exercise due to driving or from the danger on the roads due to traffic. It's an ongoing emergency situation.

My postal vote for the UK to remain in the EU was posted a few days ago - with a bicycle stamp upon it ;-) Sadly, this was sent to me so late that it was probably not counted, so I could not help the country avoid catastrophe.

Update June 2016
Boris Johnson is no longer the mayor of London. He is now leading a campaign for the UK to leave the EU and he has ambitions to become the prime minister of the UK. Please remember that this is the same BJ who was "fired from The Times in 1988 for fabricating a quotation" and who made his name by taking an extreme euro-skeptic position, inventing many of the ridiculous myths about the EU which have since been comprehensively busted.

Note: Most of the invitations which I've sent to London were sent before Andrew Gilligan started working at the city in 2013 and before I joined Twitter in 2011. The idea that Andrew Gilligan should particularly be concerned that I'd contact him through Twitter is patently absurd.

On the 4th of March 2013, Andrew Gilligan wrote of his and Boris Johnson's "ambitions for the bike". He set the scene for what was to follow by claiming that "it took 40 years to turn even Amsterdam into Amsterdam".

Today is the 4th of March 2014. London has not made any discernible progress towards becoming a proper cycling city in the last 365 days, so as of today, the automated counter on the right (code to embed it on your website or blog is produced by clicking on "embed this") has updated itself to report than the UK is now 41 years and zero days behind.

It may seem a little harsh to use Andrew's "40 years" statement in this way, but I'm very bored indeed of hearing this very well worn excuse for inaction. It was about twenty years ago when I heard "we're n years behind" being used to excuse the UK's bad cycling environment. At that time, those people who said this could only claim that the Netherlands had a twenty year head-start. The only change since then has been in the number of years by which people admit to being behind. While the Netherlands has continued to progress rapidly, the UK has continued to stagnate. The gap can only get bigger while the UK does not progress.

Can progress be made in less than 41 years ?
Before the UK was even just "twenty years behind", this video was produced in the Netherlands to demonstrate what had already been achieved:


Yes it's dated and much of what is shown is no longer to current Dutch standards, but look at what had been achieved in just 17 years in the Netherlands. Britain could have started to copy from this film 24 years ago. i.e. the UK could easily now look better than the Netherlands did when this video was made, but it doesn't.
I apologise if you think you've seen this before. You may well have done, perhaps on a study tour, or it could have been in an earlier post on this blog as this is the third time it's been featured here. The video shows the impressive result of just the first 17 years of work since policy changes in the 1970s in the Netherlands. I first wrote a blog post featuring this video six years ago. Back then, Britain was only "35 years behind the Netherlands", but unfortunately nothing of any substance has been achieved in Britain in those six years.

Actually, progress can be made in less than ten years
After the Netherlands changed its policies on cycling in the 1970s, it took just eight years until the country was impressive enough that New Scientist magazine ran an article about what had been achieved. In eight years, the Netherlands had already achieved more than London has managed when given those same eight years plus an extra 33 years which followed after the wake-up call from New Scientist.

To reach the point where the Netherlands was worth taking notice of took barely more than the six years between when I first posted the video above and the present day. It actually took less time than Boris Johnson has already been mayor of London (he has had this position since December 2005).

Not standing still vs. Same as it ever was
Even now, when they are "41 years ahead", the Netherlands is not standing still. We have seen rapid progress here in the last six years, making the infrastructure in the video look even more out of date now than it did when I first embedded it. Meanwhile, Britain has not progressed in any meaningful way in that time.

Dutch infrastructure has changed enormously since the 1970s while Britain's still looks very much as it did in the 1960s.

Cycling was in decline in both Britain and the Netherlands until the mid 1970s. It took a second revolution in Dutch street planning to reverse the decline here. As yet, that second revolution has still not taken place in Britain.

Back to London
This post started by referring to Andrew Gilligan's claim last year of London being 40 years behind. He said this in order to pave the way for the introduction four days later of plans which were supposed to make London "compete with Amsterdam". The level of hype was immense. After reading the plans I was immediately critical because it was very obvious that these plans could never achieve the stated aims. The document was long, the language was slick, and it alluded to things "Dutch". However, all that was really being offered were a few minor changes around the edges which could never achieve the stated goal. London appeared to think that it could "catch up" by spending "a third of as much as the Dutch and to do so for just ten years". Nowhere was it proposed to create the extensive grid of high quality go everywhere facilities necessary to result in a high cycling modal share.

London has has continued to borrow the names of things Dutch to describe infrastructure of far from adequate quality. Schrödinger's Cat pointed out that London had begun to use the word "grid" to describe a much lesser quality network of routes and that  "the plans are already failing to live up to the promises made" (I introduced the term "grid" to describe this important feature of Dutch infrastructure in 2008).

I visited London myself last year and was extremely disappointed with what I found. Nothing had changed for the better for cyclists. While there's a lot of hot air about cycling, there is no "cycling revolution". It's clear from their lacklustre and old-fashioned proposals that TfL still doesn't really have much of a clue what they are doing for cyclists. London actually took some small steps in the early 1980s, and had they continued then the city might have been transformed. Unfortunately, instead of continuing along this path, it was abandoned. The city still does not have infrastructure of the quality required to make it a truly pleasant and safe place to cycle.

We now know that Londoners' journeys are not different in length or purpose to journeys made by their Dutch counterparts, but cycling in London remains something that most people wouldn't consider. It's an activity for those who are either brave enough to accept the challenge, hard-up enough that they have no choice, or who are somewhere on a spectrum between those two extremes.

When there was a string of fatalities last year, Boris Johnson and Andrew Gilligan blamed cyclists rather than acknowledge the inaction of themselves and those who came before them had led to cycling being inherently dangerous as well as unpleasant in the city.

More recently, London's mayor has said that he still thinks properly designed cycling infrastructure is "totally pointless".

These people are not working for cycling and we should not let them get away with pretending that they are.

London's horrible plan for Kings X. ASLs, on-road cycle-lanes, badly designed crossings. TfL - have you learnt nothing ? Come and find out about real cycling infra. (source)

Yet more press releases
Perhaps in an attempt to forestall the inevitable criticism which would follow from having achieved nothing of substance over the last year, London has been sending out yet more press releases. These have been reported far and wide, including here in the Netherlands.

The new publicity appears to have done its job. Campaigners have almost completely forgotten about the promises made but never fulfilled last March because they're looking instead at the latest promises. Once again, it's "jam tomorrow". Once again, many campaigners are being tricked into thinking that the promise will come true.
The new announcements are actually even more lacklustre than last year. Rather than promising that the whole city will be transformed to "compete with Amsterdam", they're now promising only to transform 33 junctions. This isn't even new. It's a recycled version of the "junction review" which was promised to Londoners two years ago. To put the proposal in context, 33 junctions are to be reviewed out of thousands of road junctions in London. Even the proposals for these junctions have led to criticism because the proposals are lacklustre.

Even if London does manage to deliver what has been promised, the city will still fail to deliver what is needed because the promises made in the last week are so lacking in scope.

This has not stopped the London Cycling Campaign from adding to the hype. On the day of TfL's press release, LCC sent out two press releases of their own which praised the promises from TfL. They "congratulate the mayor" and talk about "success for campaigners".

But when the city's mayor has has done so little for cyclists and he also so recently made it clear that he doesn't understand what is needed, what are campaigners cheering about. This is not a time for praise, it's a time for sensible consideration of what is, or perhaps what is not, on offer from London's Mayor, Cycling Commissioner and TfL.

Cycling in London needs action, not words. It needs real campaigning and not mutual back patting, and will benefit greatly if campaigners can somehow forget about their amnesia, remember how things have not turned out according to press releases in the past and try to make sure that this situation doesn't continue. That promises made to cyclists are always about tomorrow is the reason why Britain is 41 years behind.

An ongoing emergency situation

The Dutch do the most moderate exercise in Europe. The British almost the least. Source @Jono_Kenyon

This is an ongoing emergency. Change is needed urgently. In London and in Britain as a whole, cycling is something that most people simply never do and this lack of cycling kills people.

The health of the average Dutch adult benefits from having the best chance in Europe to incorporate a little healthy exercise into their daily lives by cycling. Meanwhile, British adults are near the bottom of the list.

Dutch children have enormous freedom and are considered by UNICEF to have the best well-being in the world, while British children are at the bottom of the list.

Campaigners and government alike have produced manifestos, reports and any amount of hot air in Britain for decades and they still continue to do so. None of that will get people cycling. Nor will more cycle training. To get people cycling you need infrastructural change, and you need that infrastructure to be of the best quality possible.

Get building
Britain needs to start planning and building that high quality infrastructure. Stop writing press releases and get on with actually doing something. Don't delay. Start now. Having sat back for 41 years already, time is of the essence.

Cost is not an issue. It's cheaper to build cycling infrastructure than not to build it.

Time is not an issue either. As this video proves, when Britain actually wants to build infrastructure, it can be done quickly - so long as its a project that the government is genuinely behind:




I pose again a question from last year: How much time do you think you have ? At the current sub-glacial rate of change, no significant improvements can be expected for British cyclists within the life-spans of anyone campaigning now.

Click here for more information

Having low aspirations will never result in the change that is required. Come and find out how to do a proper job. Take what you learn back to the UK. We can show you how to make cycling accessible to everyone so that everyone wants to cycle.

We're here to help, but we can only help those who actually want to be helped.

The hype continues. London's "smart" pedestrian crossings.
In the week after this blog post, London achieved considerable publicity yet again (not only within the UK but also extending to the Netherlands) for plans to trial a new pedestrian crossing innovation which is claimed to improve conditions for pedestrians. In fact, crossing the road in London is a harrowing experience (as I demonstrated last year). In recent years, pedestrian green times have been shortened and shortened again, and the number of pedestrian crossings in London has also been reduced, making pedestrians' journeys longer if they wish to use a pedestrian crossing to get across the road in relative safety, or their crossing more dangerous if they do not.

What's more, London uses the concept of a countdown timer on pedestrian crossings to tell people to run faster because its not long until motorists will be given a green light, while in the Netherlands it's used to demonstrate that the delay before we can cross the road will be short so there is no need to hurry across, possibly in danger.

While on the subject of delays before crossing, these can be extraordinarily long in London compared with what I'm used to in the Netherlands. We have a maximum delay of 8 seconds for pedestrians and cyclists at many of our crossings.

However, while London is achieving press around the world, including here in the Netherlands, for its "innovation", almost no-one knows that the experience for pedestrians is in fact far better in this country than it is in the UK.

Not only Britain's cyclists but also Britain's pedestrians would do a lot better if more effort was put into actually achieving a good environment rather than simply writing press releases.

British campaigners: here's a message from the 1970s which is especially pertinent to the current situation for cyclists in the UK.

Our car has a faded sticker in the back window left over from a previous attempt to call for "space for cycling" in Britain. It makes no sense to repeat the same tried and failed campaigns.. Update: scrapped five years later

News from Britain
After much campaigning effort on behalf of cyclists in the UK, there was a debate on Monday about cycling. This has been much reported, and of course it is good news in itself that the debate happened. However, nothing has been promised as a result. All that has happened is that a motion was carried by those MPs who attended this meeting and this motion suggests setting a target of 10% of journeys by bike by 2025 and 20% by 2050. This has not been adopted by government, it is only to be the subject of more discussion.

Things like this have happened before. In 1996 the British government went further than it has yet this time around. Then, the National Cycling Strategy was adopted, an organisation was set up to oversee it which had some funds allocated and promises were made including "to double the number of cycle trips in Britain by 2002, and to double them again by 2012." i.e. by last year, 8% of journeys in the UK should have been by bike. This didn't happen. What happened in reality was that the strategy was dropped quietly a few years later and the modal share for cycling in the UK stayed more or less the same. Several other initiatives have come and gone between 1996 and now, none of them leaving a significant impact.

How much time do you have ?
The long time-scales involved with the new motion are a concern. By 2050, many of the people who debated that motion will either be retired or have deceased. That at least lets them off the hook should the policy fail as they won't be able to be held accountable for failure. Many of the people who turned up for the mass protest ride which also took place on Monday will also be retired or deceased by 2050. Even the children of the people who went on the demo won't benefit much from a policy the result of which will only be known 37 years in the future as even they are likely to be be middle aged by the time 2050 rolls along.

Timescales are important. Rapid progress is important. The UK is already forty and a half years behind, how much longer do people have to wait for decent conditions on the streets ? How much longer do campaigners who have already lived through the last forty years of indecisiveness have to wait until things start to move forwards in the UK ? Do we really have to wait another 37 years for significant progress ? Add those 37 years to the 40 years which the UK is already behind and you get a total of 77 years. i.e. very nearly the average life-expectancy for a British male.

If the motion is adopted, will the UK even then be on path to "catch up" with The Netherlands ? Unfortunately, not. If the UK was to match Dutch expenditure starting now then we could perhaps expect the quality of cycling infrastructure to approach Dutch standards asymptotically, so that it might be quite close after a decade, closer again after two decades. For more rapid progress than this considerably greater expenditure than Dutch levels would be required. Unfortunately, the most prominent campaigns in the UK set their sights at a much lower level. They have worked towards a target of just £10 per person per year, or little more than a third of the Dutch level of expenditure on cycling, or even lower figure of £100M per year, which works out at less than a tenth of the Dutch level of expenditure. A lower level of expenditure can never result in "catching up". It can only result in falling behind at a lower rate than at present, but calling for a lower level of expenditure costs just as much campaigning effort as calling for enough.

How efficiently is the money spent ?
What's more, we must also consider the relative efficiency of how the money is spent. In Cambridge this week we learnt that what is frankly a terrible transformation of a traffic light junction cost £450K from the cycling budget. In Assen, a much higher quality traffic light junction transformed just a few years ago cost just €32K from the cycling budget. If Britain is to achieve as much as The Netherlands does then the country not only needs to provide the same level of funding, but it also needs to spend those funds just as efficiently. Spending a third of the funds at a tenth of the efficiency certainly won't cut it.

Dutch children go to and from school like this today . How long do British children have to wait ?

Who is it for ?
Who are we doing this for ? It can't be for today's adult cyclists because any potential result is so far off into the future that it won't help us. The children of today's generation of cycle campaigners also won't benefit much because they'll be middle aged and parents themselves by the time 2050 comes along. Perhaps the grandchildren of today's cycling campaigners might benefit while they are still children. We should be campaigning for children, but we shouldn't be doing that simply because progress is so slow that we can never expect to see results within our lifetimes.

The Dutch made rapid progress in the 1970s and 80s by focusing on what was important to them and allocating the required funds. There s no reason why the UK could not do the same thing if a real commitment is made, good plans are in place, and real funding is made available. However, all these things need to come together.

A different campaign
Our campaigning has always been a little different because of our emphasis on children. We emigrated because not only would this improve our own lives but it also seemed like the only way we could achieve a better standard of living for our own children, but of course that's not an easy thing to do and it isn't something that everyone can or should do.

UNICEF rates the well-being of Dutch children highly and other cycling nations also score well.

It's a great disappointment to me that campaigning for Dutch infrastructure in the UK has been derailed so thoroughly by self interested groups. Gobsmackingly terrible cycling infrastructure continues to be proposed in the UK while Cycling campaigners (2), councils (2, 3, 4) and developers alike, all keen to push their own agendas, slap the words "Dutch" and "Holland" as branding on these proposals rather than using them as an indication that they are truly working for infrastructure of the quality and with the expected result seen in The Netherlands. "Go Dutch" is now so devalued in cycle campaigning in Britain that it is virtually meaningless. Having seen equally dubious proposals in other countries also described as "Dutch", this is clearly not only a British problem

For this reason, we've started campaigning very obviously in another direction. In reality it's a return to what we were always campaigning for, but hopefully this emphasis will prevent it from being so easily derailed. Walking and cycling infrastructure is but a means to an end. That end is that people can travel freely by foot and by bicycle.

A different campaigning emphasis is needed to achieve the same standard of living for children in other countries as Dutch children already have. Hence The Campaign for Childhood Freedom.

While walking infrastructure is common in most countries and usually already exists in a network which covers at least most of the places where distances are short and walking is a viable means of transport, cycling infrastructure is far less common. Cycling is particularly sensitive to subjective safety issues because cyclists are often expected to ride on busy roads. These concerns are doubled if parents are asked to consider what they will allow their children to do.

Children won't achieve freedom due to a small number of vanity projects or by minor improvements. It requires what "Go Dutch" should have implied. i.e. a dense network of very high quality infrastructure which goes everywhere, is convenient to use and is easy to understand so that it can be used safely by a five year old walking alone or riding his/her own bike. Nothing less than this is enough.

Judy and I can't be everywhere at once and in any case we don't want to travel long distances because that also would have an effect on all our children. Each country needs to own its own campaign. We want to help as much as we can by recommending ideas and we want to foster the formation of a network of people world-wide who are willing to organise campaigns in their own country which are focused on childhood freedom. For this purpose we have started a discussion forum to enable communication about how best to free children everywhere.

It is their sensitivity to the danger that their children are exposed to and wanting to look after their children which causes parents to drive more than non-parents. Parents put themselves out in order to try to keep their children safe, however children don't really benefit at all from being put into automobiles to make their journeys. Children need freedom and they especially need to cycle. The freedom which comes from being able to cycle is a good part of what results in UNICEF rating the well-being of Dutch children so highly. If we could redirect some parents' energy towards a greater goal than merely trying to make their own child so safe as possible right now then we would have an enormous movement.

If you want today's and tomorrow's children to be able to live as Dutch children already do, please get involved. If you're not sure what it takes, find out for yourself and ask questions on the forum. There are no "experts". Everyone's opinion is valuable.

We believe that parents world wide want the best for their children and they want to see progress while their children are still young enough to benefit from it, however you do not have to be a parent yourself in order to be concerned about these issues. We respect that some people have made a very rational decision to be child-free and others cannot have children. You are welcome to take part in the discussion. All adults have a responsibility for the next generation.

Let's work out together how we can achieve the same freedom for all the world's children as Dutch children already have.

London's Evening Standard and other sources added 10% to make headlines more impressive.

Like everyone I was surprised at the sudden announcement in London about investment in cycling. In typical London style, the press release quoted lots of baffling but impressive sounding numbers. As so frequently happens, these were mostly reported verbatim without any analysis, though some news sources inflated what was on offer to make a more impressive headline.

Competing with Amsterdam ?
At least one news source claimed that London was going to compete with Amsterdam.

Just four days ago, London's "cycling czar" used the well worn excuse of Britain being "40 years behind" the Netherlands in a weasel worded blog post which prepared the audience for plans that would have no intention at all of "turning London into Amsterdam anytime soon" but which we were still to see as representing "a real shift in our ambitions for the bike". As it happened, I'd already written a blog post this week which pointed out that the "forty years excuse" is very commonly used to excuse inadequate action in future and it seems that I was bang on target for this announcement.

The Netherlands spends €487 million euros every year on cycling infrastructure. That's over €30 per person per year to maintain and slowly grow from the existing strong base of cycling. This is a national figure, not just for Amsterdam, though Amsterdam's investment is about average. What London is being offered is £913 million. This sounds good until you realise that this is to be spread over ten years and is to serve a city which will have a population of 9 million people by the end of the ten year period. It works out as a mere £10 per person per year, or little over a third of the Dutch level of expenditure.

Once past the impressive headlines from London you see that Andrew Gilligan's and Boris Johnson's proposed solution to being "40 years behind" the Netherlands is to spend a third as much as the Dutch and to do so for just ten years. How can that possibly work ?

And of course the rest of the UK is not included in this. With just an inadequate plan for just one part of the country how can we expect Britain to be less than "50 years behind" at the end of this ten year period ?


Hype compared with the plans
Quite apart from adding 10% to the amount to be spent in order to make a nice round "billion" for headlines, newspapers have also reported on a "15 mile segregated bike lane" which the original document refers to as being only "substantially segregated". Many sources reproduced claims without any critical analysis, including Dutch language sources. This is of course the intention of such a dramatic press release.

Many sources quote a figure of "£18 per head", but that's only for one year out of the ten, a peak in 2015. Even this peak is still behind average in the Netherlands. What's more, this peak implies that actual expenditure in the other 9 years will be below the average of £10.

We are told that "Timid, half-hearted improvements are out – we will do things at least adequately, or not at all". I'm sure this statement is welcome because Britain has quite enough "farcilities" already. However the document doesn't actually follow this up. Some of the proposals made within it are very much "half-hearted":

For a start, setting a target of only around 5% of journeys by bike is not very ambitious at all. Nowhere in the Netherlands has such a low modal share and Britain has been promised more than this before. The lack of a serious target shows that this is not a real attempt to "catch up".

Assen. Four metre wide cycle-path behind bus-stop with cycle-parking. The same width as the proposed path in London. These already go everywhere in this country, tens of thousands of kilometres of such cycle paths form the backbone of a network which covers the whole country.

The suggestion that bus routes cannot have segregated cycle-paths because "Everybody getting off or on a bus would step straight into the lane, risking being hit by a cyclist" is without grounds. In this country, best practice places cycle-paths behind bus stops and bus-stops provide cycle-parking for multi-modal use (sometimes for an extraordinary number of bicycles).

(Update August: a few months after this article was written, London constructed an inferior design of bus stop which creates exactly the pedestrian/bicycle conflict problem they wrote about and branded it as Dutch, even though it does not resemble real Dutch bus stop bypasses at all. Similarly, the extension of Cycling Superhighway 2 was trailed as being of "Dutch" quality but includes a ludicrous junction design never found in the Netherlands).

"Shared bus and bike lanes" are also certainly not "Dutch" and these also simply not good enough. They do not meet any reasonable standards for cycle provision and I'm not alone in thinking this. PRESTO guidelines also suggest that "buses, just like lorries, create greater hazards for cyclists than passenger cars" and that they "frighten cyclists away" and cause "additional stress and less comfort". Subjective safety is all important for encouraging a high cycling modal share.

Given the small budget it won't be possible to achieve the needed change across all of London. For that reason I quite like the idea of the "mini-Hollands" (see footnote about the name). If they truly are "every bit as cycle-friendly as their Dutch equivalents; places that suburbs and towns all over Britain will want to copy" then they could have the desired effect. However, it will only work so long as these promises are met. i.e. so long as the areas they cover are extensive enough to be useful, they genuinely have high enough quality design to attract people to cycle, and so long as there really is an intention to follow it through over the rest of the city and the entire country at a later date. That may sound like a lot to ask, but it is not an unreasonable aim. The Dutch have already demonstrated that it is possible to do this over an entire country with double the population and over 20x the area of London.

The "Central London Bike Grid" sounds positive. Joining up routes is vital. However, if this is inspired by the Dutch concept of a tight grid of very high quality routes then it really needs to be of the same high quality and density, and over the entire city, not just the centre. It's fair enough to start in the centre (and the "mini Hollands" should naturally have this as a matter of course if they're to live up to their name) but it must spread everywhere eventually. In the Netherlands, the importance of such a grid was known to be vital for attracting people to cycle so far back as the early 1980s. No cycle-route is stronger than its weakest link.

"We will grade routes so people know what to expect" is a strange thing to put into the proposal as it's a tacit admission that not all the routes proposed will be usable by all people. Dutch cycle-routes do not have and do not need, grades. Every route in the Netherlands is suitable for every person to use. If London is truly building to Dutch standard then London's cycle-routes won't need to be graded either.

Improving access to Advanced Stop Lines by providing a short length of cycle-path is not nearly enough. ASLs need to go. Yes the Netherlands also built ASLs in the 1980s and yes, some of them still survive. However, those which caused most problems have gone and the remaining few are to be found on relatively minor roads. It's just a matter of waiting for them to go, their days are numbered. New ASLs are not being built in the Netherlands and there is no reason why they should be built in London. London doesn't need to copy a mistake which causes conflict. Move on. Advanced designs of traffic light junctions do not put cyclists into conflict with cars. Why not try simultaneous green traffic lights in London. These are very successful because they remove conflict in both time and space.

Why not just be cheerful ?
For all I've written above I cautiously welcome the proposals because they do appear to offer London's cyclists more than they've ever been offered before. However, I call upon campaigners in the UK to stop behaving as if they are already victorious. There has been no success yet. All you have is a few nice mocked up photos and animations and some actually quite vague promises about how less than adequate funding will be spent. It's just possible that with enough campaigning effort this will turn into something great. However, no turf has been disturbed as yet. It is premature to celebrate or to write about "success". We must remain skeptical.

1996's "National Cycling Strategy" set a target to double cycling by 2002 and quadruple by 2012. Cycling nationally should already be double the ambition for London

I've been involved in cycle campaigning for long enough to have seen this sort of thing before. In 1996 I was one of the campaigners who celebrated the National Cycling Strategy, which was abandoned before anything had been achieved.

In recent years, cyclists also seen the National Cycling Plan for England come and go with barely a whisper.

Bristol was named as a "Cycling City" and several other places were named as "Cycling Towns". There was a lot of publicity, and just as in this instance many newspapers and websites reproduced the press-releases uncritically.

2009: TfL's original concept of a "Superhighway". People criticized me for pointing out that this wasn't good enough. London's new plans are also not good enough.

London made many bold claims for the bike hire scheme and when the city proposed the very obviously flawed "superhighways" the resulting storm of publicity was sufficient even to make some Dutch people think they were about to be overtaken.

However, publicity is not the aim. Cycling is the aim. Given past experience of promises made but not always kept, campaigners are not here to help politicians or councils make a name for themselves, they must judge their success on how much people cycle. Campaigners need to be very cautious in their support. It's important to stay focused and make sure that London delivers more than has yet been promised.

That's why the serious campaigning must start now.

Monday 11 update
Spokes point out that Transport for London's annual budget amounts to approximately £5 Billion per year and that the proportion to be spent on cycling is under 2%. They also point out that Edinburgh has committed 5% of its budget to cycling, but I suppose the smaller numbers involved don't make such impressive headlines. They certainly have not been used by a publicity machine so large as that in London.

Tuesday 12 update
I read a few other reports including one on the Fietsberaad website which highlighted some facts not reported widely which I had missed. The plans include a near doubling of the London shared bike scheme to 11000 bikes and there are to be 80000 cycle-parking spaces built. It also suggested that only a third of the headline total of £913M promised has actually been sourced. Schrödinger's Cat pointed out that the figures were in the original document on London's own website, but had been overlooked by most people.

So let's look at this in more detail. The bike hire scheme cost London £140 million pounds and operating costs work out as approximately £2500 per bike per year. Hopefully the expansion won't result in quite the same capital cost again, but clearly we need to expect it to take a good chunk out of the money already allocated and if operating costs increase in line with the number of bikes, that's £27M per year that London will be paying for a service used for 0.2% of journeys. Will it be good value for money ? As I pointed out three years ago, a lack of bikes was never the problem in London, it was just that people were scared to cycle. The bike share scheme could easily consume a third of the total funding that has been announced.

A photo of just the indoor parking at a Dutch railway station before the initiative to build more spaces.

80000 cycle-parking spaces ? I was quite hopeful about because I thought it might make London's railway stations more comparable with those in the Netherlands. However, I then realised that these are not just for railway stations. but for all uses across the city. It sounds like a good number but actually it's only one bike rack for every 1000 citizens. As this is a ten year plan I think it's constructive to compare with the result of ten year cycle-parking construction plan which ran in the Netherlands. In 1999 a promise was made to install 200000 extra cycle-parking spaces at railway stations. In 2010 the 200000th of these stands was installed. A further 60000 spaces were then constructed by 2012 and the railway company promised that they would install 25000 more each year per year until 2020. You may think it's unreasonable to compare a single city with a whole country, but the population of the Netherlands is only double that of London. If London's promise had been 80000 more spaces at railway stations only in ten years, that would still have been considerably fewer per capita than the Dutch have already delivered over the last ten years and will continue to build for the next 7 years.

Finally, the finances. The Fietsberaad link says that just £300M has yet been allocated in London. That's enough to invest at Dutch levels in London for just 18 months. However it appears that this money is to be tapped into to pay for expanding the bike hire scheme and this may leave less than one year's worth of funding at Dutch levels.

What can I say ? These extra figures are disappointing. Unfortunately, the more we find out, the more it seems was hidden by the initial hype.

Who is the "Cycling Commissioner" ?
The language of the "new vision" is lovely of course. It has convinced many cyclists that there is a real change in the status of cyclists in London and that was of course its job. However, in reality TfL has so far committed only 2% of the transport budget for London to this project and it has done so for just three of the ten years.

So who is behind the language ? It is surely not for nothing that Boris chose to employ a journalist, Andrew Gilligan, as cycling commissioner rather than appointing an engineer to the job. If you want good headlines and to convince people without making any really large commitments then a good writer is surely exactly the person you need.

A message to TfL
I know someone there reads my blog because an expensive firm of architects that you asked to find out about Assen tried to get me to do their work for them for free. Why don't you give some credit ? More to the point, if you want to know about what you've read on my blog, why not ask me directly instead of asking someone else to ask me ? And if you want you planners to understand how the infrastructure here works, how about actually sending some of your staff on one of our study tours so that we can demonstrate everything to them. They can see it for themselves and benefit from our experience. We'd be very pleased to meet them and to show them what state of the art cycling infrastructure looks like. Take advantage of our extensive knowledge of cycling in both the UK and in the Netherlands - I'm quite sure we don't cost as much as that large firm of architects.

Update December 2013
London has sadly experienced a run of cyclist deaths and this has been followed by protests. The response from both Andrew Gilligan and Boris Johnson has been weak at best. Both have blamed cyclists for their own misfortune rather than accepting that the extremely poor infrastructure in London, which they both have responsibility for, is to blame. While both of these two continue to claim that no change to infrastructure could have saved lives, in the Netherlands people live on a day to day basis with infrastructure which achieves exactly that. Read my response to a visit to London this year or all the articles about London, which demonstrate many of the problems and dangers which the city poses for cyclists.

Update one year later
One year later, nothing much had changed in London, but there were plenty of new press releases. Read my response: Another year without progress in London.

Update two years later
Another year as passed and London still has little to show for it past a flurry of preposterous proposals, bad designs and voluminous hype. It's still the case that nothing significant has changed in London and as 2015 is the year of maximum expenditure this is the make or break year.

Just over two years after I wrote this piece, the inadequate target of 5% of trips in London by bike by 2026 was abandoned.


Please also read David Arditti's excellent response to the proposals. He's a little more positive than me, but he's still critical.

LCC, TfL: Please stop talking about "Holland". Holland is to the Netherlands much as England is to the UK. You'll have noticed that Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh people can get quite upset about parts of their countries being referred to as England. It's much the same over here. People from the 10 provinces of the Netherlands which are not either North Holland or South Holland would prefer that you refer to this country as "The Netherlands"