London’s Cycling Boom is About So Much More Than Bike Lanes
By Vanessa Harrison
In London, we have learned that to get more Londoners riding bikes, no matter their location, age, gender, race, or ability, it is essential to build calm, consistent, clearly designated, and safe cycle routes. These routes require much more than painted lanes on roads with a stenciled bicycle logo. They include a variety of types of infrastructure: neighbourhood streets where traffic has been slowed or diverted, protected cycle lanes on busier roads, streets closed in the morning and afternoon to enable children to cycle to school, and intersections that have been reconfigured to give people on bikes a priority. It also needs more than physical infrastructure: investing in social infrastructure and understanding wider barriers to cycling is vital.
London’s ambition is to be the best big city for cycling, allowing more people to benefit from the joy of cycling while meeting London’s climate goals, improving air quality, and advancing public health outcomes. In the city, 63% of car trips could be cycled. To shift these journeys, more residents must feel like cycling is a genuine option for them. While white men in employment are the most likely group to cycle, potential cyclists are more diverse and representative of London. These Londoners may be dissuaded by concerns about safety from vehicles, the perception that cycling in London requires LYCRA-clad confidence, the costs of buying and maintaining a bike, or a feeling that ‘cycling isn’t for me’. Working together with community groups and campaigners, Transport for London and London’s boroughs are working hard to build systems and strategies to address these concerns, including by making safe, easy-to-navigate bicycle routes reaching more of London’s communities.
We wouldn’t expect somebody to ride a subway system that has major gaps in its service or a bus network that stops in random places: in the same way, London’s cycle network, known as Cycleways, needs to be reliable and widely available to encourage more people to use it. Improving the reach and quality of the Cycleway network addresses the main barrier preventing Londoners from cycling: road danger. The growth of Cycleways results in the growth of cycling, and beyond improving people’s confidence to cycle, data shows that building these high-quality cycleways actually reduces risk, with those parts of London where the Cycleway network has grown most seeing the greatest reduction in relative cycle injuries.
Thanks to recent expansions and quality improvements, the cycle network now connects communities and neighbourhoods across London and consists of protected cycle lanes on busier roads, routes through quiet backstreets, and some fully off-road separated paths through green spaces, such as along London’s canal network. London recently celebrated a milestone: the Cycleways network reached 360 kilometers in 2024, quadrupling in length from 2016, the year Sadiq Khan was first elected Mayor of London. As a result, cycling in London is booming, with 1.26 million daily cycle journeys in 2023, a 20% increase since 2019 and equivalent to around a third of all Tube journeys per day.
We know that people use their phones to plan their journeys and it is important that people have access to accurate information and data about the safest and quietest cycle routes, as well as the journey time. London has partnered with Google to ensure better wayfinding for people using Google Maps, to improve confidence for new and established cyclists alike. This pioneering partnership means that Google now prioritizes routes that use quieter and safer streets in London, and will roll out the technology — created and trialed in London — to other cities worldwide, enabling more than 60 million app users to benefit every month. In a city with an old and often confusing street layout, technology has to reflect the reality that the straightest route is not always the most appropriate — and that wayfinding is essential for many riders.
Not long ago, however, the network was far less consistent and legible. These quiet, neighborhood routes were previously designated Quietways, non-segregated routes on residential streets; and Cycle Superhighways on major streets to support commuter cycle flows into central London. There were no consistent design quality standards which resulted in a patchwork network, where bike lane width, condition, and signage differed across the city, which impacted confidence in the network for both cyclists and potential cyclists. The previous names also created unintended perceptions: ‘Superhighway’ conjured images of a highway for cycles, traveling long distances at very high speed; whilst Quietways were expected to be quiet, but were not always. In addition, these names set expectations about the nature of infrastructure in a given location, which also impacted the political appetite for expansion and expected costs.
By bringing all routes under the broader umbrella of Cycleways and introducing new design quality criteria for all new parts of the network, Transport for London and London’s boroughs have worked to standardize the network and its quality. The broader terminology also enabled flexibility to design the right infrastructure for the place, rather than being limited by the binary of Superhighways or Quietways. The quality criteria introduced alongside Cycleways mean that the existing road conditions, like the speed of traffic and nature of kerbside activity, need to be considered, alongside the aim to create Healthy Streets, to ensure the cycle infrastructure designed is appropriate for the context. Since 2019, these older Quietways and Cycleways have gradually been incorporated into the wider Cycleway network when they meet the quality standards.
High-quality cycle lanes are a vital part of the Cycleway network, but the network is more than this. Take a bike ride through London and you will be likely to pass through neighborhoods where through traffic has been restricted to reduce car travel, cross intersections that have been reconfigured to give cyclists their own signals and space away from motor traffic, and bike parking to suit different bike types and sizes. Through these interventions, we make it safer, easier, faster, and more convenient to cycle, which will encourage potential bike riders to give it a go — and make cycling more visible.
In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for COVID-safe transportation, the UK’s national government released funding for temporary active travel infrastructure which was used to build trial cycle lanes, Low Traffic Neighborhoods, and School Streets across London. Transport for London distributed funding to London’s boroughs, which could direct funding to the specific interventions appropriate for their communities and neighborhoods. These interventions — alongside the restrictions of the pandemic, changed travel patterns, and significantly reduced road traffic — contributed to a massive boom in cycling.
Around 100 Low-Traffic Neighborhoods (LTNs) — an area-based traffic management scheme aimed at reducing or removing through traffic from residential neighborhoods using filters or physical barriers — were built with COVID-era funding. They have a new name but are not a new concept: restricting traffic to neighborhoods has been done formally in London since the 1970s, and by building cul-de-sacs, commonplace across the UK. Many of these new LTNs were implemented as trials, employing wooden planters as barriers and using a special experimental type of permitting, significantly speeding up the delivery of the interventions. An LTN along Church Street in the North London neighborhood of Stoke Newington was introduced in September 2021, and the modal filters that limited car and heavier vehicle traffic during workday hours resulted in a 60% reduction in through traffic, 16% increase in pedestrian use, 38% increase in cycling, and no impact on bus journey times. Following the implementation, businesses saw a 200% increase in spending, showing that active travel investment can boost local economies.
To get everybody riding bikes, we need to make sure that parents, caretakers, and children are comfortable cycling, and this begins with children’s most common trips: to school. London’s boroughs have been implementing School Streets, which encourage and support more children to walk, wheel, scoot, and cycle to school by limiting traffic flows outside of schools before and after the school day. A study showed that School Streets can reduce traffic immediately outside of school entrances by 70% to 90% and encourage more children to cycle to school, and they can improve air quality across the whole day. There are now over 500 School Streets in London, mostly introduced with the COVID-era funding.
Beyond physical infrastructure, it is also vital to consider the central role that social infrastructure plays in London’s cycling boom. London will not achieve its ambition to improve the equity of cycling without continuing to invest in social infrastructure and address wider factors that may affect whether somebody can choose to cycle.
Campaigners and community organizations are vital partners and critical friends, pushing TfL and London’s boroughs to deliver more and deliver better, and supporting more people to cycle in London through providing advocacy, community, and access to training and skills. The impact of groups like the London Cycling Campaign, Wheels for Wellbeing, and Joyriders can be seen on the ground and in policy. London supports its advocacy organizations with grant funding to enable more people to enjoy active travel. The Mayor of London and London’s boroughs also fund bike training for children and adults and free bicycle maintenance to address concerns around cycle skills.
Alongside social infrastructure, it is also essential to consider the wider societal barriers that prevent people from cycling. This means considering discounts on cycle hire schemes, and affordable and safe ways to own and store a bike, such as investing in on-street Cycle Hangers. It also means continuing to learn about how the existing physical infrastructure affects people’s journeys, such as undertaking women’s safety audits, in recognition that 9 out of 10 women cyclists have experienced verbal abuse or aggression from other road users.
Cycling in London can no longer be considered a niche pursuit: it is a foundational and mainstream part of traveling in London. Building on this foundation, London must continue to deliver the physical infrastructure necessary, expanding the cycle network to other parts of London and filling in the gaps in the existing network. It must do this whilst continuing to learn and adapt its strategies to ensure all Londoners feel safe and confident to use what is built. But it must also continue to invest in social infrastructure, both directly and through deepening ties with community and campaigners, to identify and address other barriers to cycling.
Vanessa Harrison works in the Greater London Authority’s Transport Team, where she leads on cycling and bus policy. She works with London’s Walking and Cycling Commissioner and Transport for London to implement the Mayor of London’s ambitions for transport in London. In 2024, she took a sabbatical from London’s city government to undertake research on participatory budgeting and active travel, funded by the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute. Beyond the UK, she has lived in the Netherlands, Canada, the US, and Malaysia, and is interested in creating equitable, just, and resilient places. She can be reached on X/Twitter at @vvvanff.
This article was originally published in Transportation Alternatives’ Vision Zero Cities Journal as part of the 2024 Vision Zero Cities conference.
