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Caution infernal traffic (CC BY-NC 2.0 licensed by duncan c:Flickr)Does London traffic slow-down account for capital's bike boom?
While you can argue about whether there's a general UK bike boom happening, there's no doubt London is having one. There are now twice as many journeys by bike in the capital as a decade ago. But the latest figures suggest the reason is simple: London traffic is now so slow a bike is far and away the fastest way to travel.
The Department for Transport's most recent figures for average traffic speeds on local A roads show that London has the ten slowest local authority areas in England during the morning peak — and it's getting slower.
The prizes for England's slowest traffic go to Camden and the City of London, where the average speed is just 9.2mph. Camden held the title for the 12 months to September 2013 too, but a six percent slowdown in the City, versus just two percent in Camden, brought them level.
The pattern is repeated all over London. Traffic is slower in inner London as a whole, with a fall in average speed of 6.1 percent between 2013 and 2014 to just 12.3mph. That's the lowest since 2006-7.
And speeds have also dropped by 7.4 percent on all the roads managed by Transport for London, despite Mayor Boris Johnson's policy of smoothing traffic flow. The 13.4mph average on those roads is also the lowest since 2006-7.
That makes a bike the fastest way to get around London's streets.
And it's not just London. Traffic speed blackspots elsewhere in the county include Bristol, with an average of 14.5mph, Reading at just 13.6mph and Manchester at 15.4mph. That might be a bit more than a leisurely pootle to the office but it still makes cycling an attractive proposition when you consider the savings in fuel and parking charges.
The Department's average speeds are for traffic in both directions. In some London boroughs they may well reflect the average speed of the commuter run, but in larger areas where drivers are mostly heading into town during the peak, the average likely masks a lower speed for the poor souls sitting in traffic.
Here are the figures for the 10 slowest areas inside and outside the capital.
| Local Authority |
Average speed (mph) |
Change since 2012/3 (percentage) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 slowest London boroughs | ||
| Camden | 9.2 | -2.0 |
| City of London | 9.2 | -5.8 |
| Islington | 9.9 | -3.6 |
| Lewisham | 10.4 | -3.1 |
| Lambeth | 10.5 | -7.3 |
| Southwark | 10.5 | -4.4 |
| Westminster | 11.2 | -0.9 |
| Haringey | 11.5 | -9.9 |
| Wandsworth | 11.7 | -4.7 |
| Kensington and Chelsea | 11.9 | 0.0 |
| 10 slowest outside London | ||
| Reading | 13.6 | -4.8 |
| Bristol, City of | 14.5 | -3.2 |
| Slough | 15.3 | -3.6 |
| Manchester | 15.4 | -1.2 |
| Nottingham | 15.6 | -4.1 |
| Southampton | 15.9 | -7.5 |
| Leicester | 16.1 | -4.2 |
| Tameside | 16.3 | 1.8 |
| Brighton and Hove | 16.4 | -2.9 |
| Kingston upon Hull, City of | 16.8 | 1.4 |
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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19 comments
That makes a bike the fastest way to get around London's streets.
Surely a scooter/motorbike is the fastest followed by a bicycle. In the context of this website and article, bike means a bicycle yes?
The real reason you can't take back roads in London is that...
A: The direct lines are on the 'major' roads (and they're not exactly big, just too busy), and
B: They're full of rat runners when they connect anywhere useful.
I used to commute down Gloucester Road in Bristol. 1.5 miles (from Nevil Road). 30 minutes by bus, slightly less walking. I'd smile at the bus passengers from the pavement as we overtook each other back and forth. Crazy.
As well as the average journey time, one of the biggest selling points of cycling is a consistent and reliable journey time (assuming you avoid punctures and getting knocked off).
Schwalbe Marathon Plus for avoiding punctures. I've had my annual puncture - dodgy tube, I think.
I dream of 14mph when I get a bus from Brimsdown to Enfield (3.0 miles, 45 minutes on an average day, +/-20). The only reason I won't cycle in winter is because there are absolutely no cycling provisions apart from 2 token ASL boxes that are unusable in rush hour.
At that pace, I'd simply walk...
3 miles is a nice distance to run/jog though...
Average speed hides a lot of info though - while the average may well be slower than a bike, in motor traffic it tends to be very stop-start with cars spending a long time idling at lights/snarled in traffic but then short periods where it can get up to 30mph while a cyclist spends much more time actually riding, cruising along at a steady-ish 12-15mph (depending on type of bike, style of riding etc...)
That's a 10-20minute cycle, the roads in Enfield aren't all that bad, the drivers are a bunch of ****s. But for cutting 45 minutes off a journey twice, you wouldn't catch me anywhere near a bus.
Well 3 miles is a 45 minute walk as well. Ok, so I walk reasonably fast but if it was taking that long on the bus, I'd rather do the journey on foot. And as someone else pointed out, jogging would cut the time further still.
The problem with cycling in London is you can't take to the back roads much because you get blocked by railway lines, canals and motorways. There needs to be more 'permeability', even if it means strategically knocking down a few houses and building a few pedestrian/cycle only bridges and tunnels.
Permeability isn't bad in South London (we filled in our only (?) canal!), I'd say, and there are quite a few cycle/pedestrian-only cut throughs that make good routes unattractive to motor vehicles. Handy cycle contra-flows on one-way streets are becoming quite prevalent too, especially in the City.
Who's willing to bet the Daily Mail/BBC news website readers are going to read this and state that the slow traffic is due to all those damned cyclists clogging up the streets.
Although it makes no sense to any rational mind here's another opportunity to blame something on lack of helmets and high viz, also I wouldn't put it past them to state that if cyclists stopped jumping red lights, that'd also speed up traffic.
And if we replace all those cyclists with an equal number of cars, does anyone really believe the average speed will go up?
Another factor is avoiding public transport with further terrorist attacks highly likely.
I assume you also don't go outside the front door without a bodyguard, motorbike outriders and air support? The risk of these thing happening is so small, and likelihood of any one person being directly involved in it so ridiculous as to not worth changes your own behaviours for, unless you're a paranoid foil-hatter. What is much more of importance is why current culture is so biased towards the use of personal motor vehicles rather than believing the fantasist plot of a Tom Clancy paperback.
Unfortunately the congestion charge in London seems to be constrained by what the mayor thinks drivers will tolerate, rather than what it needs to be to keep traffic levels to an acceptable amount.
A large part of the shift away from motoring has been simple economics. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next twelve months with petrol prices now plummeting, and with a general election coming up you can be sure the Government isn't going to rush to increase fuel duty.
More and more people driving it seems... plus taxi and lorry numbers seem to ever increase too.
Another factor is avoiding public transport with further terrorist attacks highly likely. London used to be a nice place to walk around, nowadays Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus and Parliament Square are as iconic as a motorway service station.
What's happened to those places? They don't appear to have changed much - still traffic-dominated in all the years I can remember.
I figured that out back I the mid 90s. Finally there's data to back it up.