- News
- Reviews
- Bikes
- Accessories
- Accessories - misc
- Computer mounts
- Bags
- Bar ends
- Bike bags & cases
- Bottle cages
- Bottles
- Cameras
- Car racks
- Child seats
- Computers
- Glasses
- GPS units
- Helmets
- Lights - front
- Lights - rear
- Lights - sets
- Locks
- Mirrors
- Mudguards
- Racks
- Pumps & CO2 inflators
- Puncture kits
- Reflectives
- Smart watches
- Stands and racks
- Trailers
- Clothing
- Components
- Bar tape & grips
- Bottom brackets
- Brake & gear cables
- Brake & STI levers
- Brake pads & spares
- Brakes
- Cassettes & freewheels
- Chains
- Chainsets & chainrings
- Derailleurs - front
- Derailleurs - rear
- Forks
- Gear levers & shifters
- Groupsets
- Handlebars & extensions
- Headsets
- Hubs
- Inner tubes
- Pedals
- Quick releases & skewers
- Saddles
- Seatposts
- Stems
- Wheels
- Tyres
- Health, fitness and nutrition
- Tools and workshop
- Miscellaneous
- Tubeless valves
- Buyers Guides
- Features
- Forum
- Recommends
- Podcast
UPDATED: Sadiq Khan's office says fears over London's cycling budget "complete nonsense"
UPDATED: Mayor of London Sadiq Khan's office say it is "complete nonsense that the capital's cycling budget risks being cut - although he acknowledged this morning that the amount of money allocated to it in the coming years can only be determined once Transport for London (TfL) publishes its new business plan later this year, leading one London Assembly member to warn that “cycle spending could fall off a cliff.”
The Labour politician, who replaced Boris Johnson in May this year, was responding to a question from the Green Party’s Caroline Russell at this morning’s Mayor’s Question Time at City Hall.
Ms Russell, elected to the London Assembly in May and an Islington councillor, asked Mr Khan: “Will you keep your cycling funding at £155 million throughout your time as Mayor?”
Mr Khan, who ahead of the mayoral elections this year said he supported the London Cycling Campaign’s Sign for Cycling pledges, replied: “Rather than speculating on research, let’s see what the business proposal due to come out soon says about how much we should spend.”
> Khan backs LCC Sign for Cycling pledges
The Green Party assembly member also urged the mayor to roll out Cycle Superhighways to unlock cycling potential there, but Mr Khan said it would be wrong for TfL to put “all their eggs in one basket.”
The exchange followed the publication last week of a report by the London Assembly’s Budget and Performance Committee which warned that TfL’s finances faced a crisis as a result of government funding being withdrawn earlier than anticipated, leaving a hole of £2.8 billion.
It also said that Mr Khan’s fares freeze would cost TfL £640 million over four years, while £30 million each year would be lost through the bus hopper ticket introduced this month.
Ms Russell pointed out to the mayor that encouraging cycling would help TfL save money, saying: “Your fares freeze will save the average household around £200 a year, but every new London cyclist could save £800 a year. Many thousands of Londoners won’t feel confident in taking up cycling.”
Following the session, she warned that funding for cycling “could fall of a cliff.”
She said: “I am very disappointed that the Mayor refused to rule out cycling budget cuts today.
“During his election campaign he pledged to increase the proportion of TfL funding for cycling, his fares freeze and other pressures mean the overall pot for transport investment is going to shrink.
“That means cycle spending could fall off a cliff even if he meets his campaign pledge.”
“We need the mayor to increase the cycling budget significantly and show he is dedicated to building more cycle routes so that a greater range of people can start to cycle.
“London needs more cycling to clean up our polluted air, reduce traffic and take pressure off other forms of transport.
“The superhighways that have been built so far have been phenomenally successful. So many more Londoners feel confident about cycling since they’ve been built.
“Londoners who cycle, or who want to cycle, will be concerned that the Mayor refused to rule out budget cuts when I questioned him today.
“I will be urging him to think again as he draws up his transport plans,” she added.
The mayor's office rejected the claims, however, telling road.cc: "This is complete nonsense. Sadiq has made it very clear that he will increase the proportion of TfL funding spent on cycling, and more details will be outlined soon in the forthcoming business plan.”
"Sadiq wants to make London a byword for cycling, In the last few weeks, Sadiq has given his support for progressing with major cycling schemes, including Cycle Superhighway 11 and the new North-South Cycle Superhighway. Sadiq will work closely with his new Walking and Cycling Commissioner to ensure he is the most pro-cycling Mayor yet."
Unveiling the Budget and Performance Committee’s report last week, its chairman, Gareth Bacon, said: “Major capital investment in the transport network is needed to keep London moving as its population continues to grow.
“But the funding to support this investment is now at risk. Government funding will be cut to zero faster than TfL had previously expected. And the Mayor’s fares freeze will put another dent in TfL’s finances.
“Will TfL be able to deliver the Mayor’s transport priorities? What we heard in this investigation hasn’t exactly filled us with confidence.”
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
Latest Comments
- ktache 14 min 39 sec ago
Isn't it a rights issue?
- antigee 19 min 11 sec ago
I've checked on Facebook and stopping the red light running cyclists was simply revenue raising and police time is better spent chasing real...
- Mikezerodown 58 min 19 sec ago
They were before change all systems, then went downhill due to bad adminstration aka CEO who agree to proceed with the worst system I have seen...
- AidanR 1 hour 4 min ago
Same here - it took me by surprise. 10:30am doesn't feel like a dangerous time to cycle; apparently I'm wrong on that.
- Daddy Feebs 1 hour 18 min ago
If anything, it looks a bit like an SL6
- wtjs 1 hour 54 min ago
Other commenters have different views True!
- Daclu Trelub 2 hours 8 min ago
Incredibly bone-headed.
- wtjs 3 hours 42 min ago
after I said that if they wouldn't tell me the outcome of a submission I would have to make an FOI request for it...
- Sriracha 4 hours 11 min ago
Lidl have a window poster emblazoned, "Black Friday. Starts Sunday".
Add new comment
20 comments
The biggest hole in Sadiq's election campaign was his many and varied uncosted promises, particularly over fares on public transport. Having finally done the maths his bean counters are telling him "there's not enough in the pot". Worse still is the inherent conflict of interest between closing that hole and spending on cycling, as any spending on cycling that detracts frompublic transport use is a problem.
Perhaps we should all just accept that, love him or loathe him, at least Boris Johnson was a cyclist.
Is he a politician? Was he trying to get elected? Were his lips moving?
If the answers are Yes, Yes and Yes then of course he was lying.
Having said that let's move on to the real problem with cars in cities - the catalytic converter.
Catalytic converters are really good at cleaning up exhaust emissions when they are hot. Half an hour of fast motorway running will usualy do the trick and bring them up to temperature. Oh! You see, round town cats don't get hot enough to work and whilst they're cold the emissions are even worse than if you have no cat at all. Why do you think that the motor manufacturers were so happy to introduce them (Well all except Toyota)? Yep! it saved them from having to clean up their engines. Politicians were very happy to accept the motor manufacturer's hospitality and the dodgy science and push it all through. It looked good and made them look decisive, but actualy achieved very little and didn't rock the boat.
Why were Toyota unhappy? They had an Ultra Lean-Burn Engine well advanced in the design stage. Sadly ULB engines do not run well with cats so when the legislation was passed that said that all new cars had to be fitted with cats then ULB engines were dead in the water.
Yes, there would still be too many cars in our cities. But at least we would be breathing easier.
Words to live by.
Political meddling is also the reason for the preponderance of privately-owned diesels on our roads. In the 90s, German car manufacturers were unable to compete with the petrol engines of their Japanese competition. However, they were quite good at producing diesel engines, so the tax system was used to make diesel engines more attractive than infinitely cleaner petrol engines. The Japanese, having not invested in diesel tech due to its inherent unsuitability for private transport, lost ground to the German manufacturers.
My mid-90s Italian petrol-powered car actually has a system to reduce the time taken to light the cats off. For the first 10-15 minutes after starting, the motor runs rich and an electric pump injects air into the exhaust manifold, heating up the cats using unburnt fuel. If the Italians could do it in the mid-90s, why can't modern cars use the same system? Because it loses a few mpg during that time and would completely trash the spurious Euro mpg figures used in their marketing materials.
Yes, driven (no pun intended) by need and obligation to reduce CO2. Which is important.
And which should have been achieved by reducing the use of private cars. But they chose the 'easy' option (easy for drivers, less so for the rest of us)
Isn't the urban pollution problem more to do with commercial vehicles - buses, taxis, trucks?
Modern, especially petrol, cars aren't spewing out NOx and particulate matter. Private cars aren't even very prevalent at many larger city centre air quality hotspots, e.g. around Central Station in Glasgow or Oxford Street in London.
Haven't per km CO2 emissions from new cars fallen substantially since the mid-90s (with more to come)? That's not "very little" and it's in part due to the switch to diesel cars.
The switch to diesel may have hindered progress in tackling localised pollution - but to say it has achieved "very little" seems unbalanced.
The urban pollution is also down to the huge increase in the use of diesel by private vehicles. Petrol cars have actually gotten much better, but unfortunately the state idiotically decided to encourage diesel just as petrol engines were improving.
It has achieved less-than-nothing, becuase a reduction in CO2 could have been achieved without killing people via particulates and NOx, by getting people to drive less. But nobody wanted to upset drivers (can't really call them 'petrolheads' in this context).
Sadiq Khan had has adult onset asthma.
Partly due to his own suffering he aims to extend the congestion zone and charge different prices for diesel cars depending on their age by 2020. He however hasn't clearly stated how he will tackle private hire vehicles ( even though a lot of Uber cars are Toyota Prius) and black cabs.
Partly due to money. There is a environmental group suing the government over not having plans to tackle air pollution and as the air pollution levels in London particularly near some schools have breached EU regulations on loads of days, he also doesn't want to get sued.
The government did get people to drive less by changing company car taxation, supporting EU efficiciency regulations, through the fuel price escalator and - more debately - huge investment in rail (and other public transport in London, if not elsewhere). They also passed a road traffic reduction act which encouraged local authorities to promote alternatives, although no-one remembers that. Traffic growth since the mid-90s has reduced sharply and has sometimes declined on a per head basis (although this is part of a wider phenomenon seen in other developed nations).
But governments only govern with consent in democracies so of course they didn't want to upset drivers - they're a large section of voters. Labour ended up being tarred as conducting a "war on motorists" and having to deal with blockades of fuel refineries. So it retreated on its aims because that's what we as a nation seemed to want. The current lot are committed to road building and I haven't seen much opposition to that idea.
We get the governments we deserve.
Got any stats to back up your claim about 'getting people to drive less'? Not entirely a rhetorical question, as I haven't got directly-relevant stats myself, but the total volume of traffic went up considerably throughout that period, rising every year, and didn't start to drop till the banking crisis/recession. Possibly one could argue you have to allow for population growth and even economic growth, but I see no evidence the government got people to drive less.
EU efficiency regulations were, as we now know, a bit of a joke. The fuel price escalator was not stuck to, and the investment in public transport was not great outside of London, not even going so far as to re-regulate bus services.
Of course 'traffic growth' will slow, because there aren't that many people left to take up driving! That's not a sign of any government policies, its just the natural order of things when you are starting from a point where only a small minority of households have a car (in the '60s it was only about 1 in 8). But its whether it will go into reverse for a sustained period that is the issue.
And yes, you have the little problem of drivers voting, but that's the issue, really - if a government isn't prepared to take on the powerful and find solutions (not necessarily a majority numerically, but one when you weight by political and economic power) then they aren't going to achieve anything.
PS jury's still out on Khan. Though I'm still irritated by that stupid garden bridge.
Sorry but petrol engines, as I understand, do emit NOx and particulates. Also the wearing out of tyres or road surfaces by any vehicle actually creates particulates too.
Apologies, I used loose language. Petrol engines do emit NOx and PMs - but at a lower level. Recent diesels have closed the gap, although more in test labs than in actual use (part of the problem seems to be that EU regulations aren't having the intended effect).
Lots of things create particulates – London Underground trains’ wheels grinding on generate lots of it (but I’m not sure the effects have been properly understood)
It all comes down to tax...
Bikes cost less, so less VAT
They dont have to be registered or pay VED so less money again
They also dont buy fuel which is heavily taxed
They also dont have to have insurance which is also taxed
Bikes contribute very little in tax, and benefit the users not the treasury!
Anyone on a limited income would benefit financially from cycling, but we live in a car culture. Poor people are being priced out of areas where they work, and so have to commute too far.
How the Mayor of London allocates huge TfL resources doesn't come down to tax. And I don't think Londoners really live in a car culture (whatever that is - certainly most don't own one, ownership and use is declining and most trips are made by other means).
All true but I do eat more cake than I used to, so it's not all bad news for the treasury
You should switch to chocolate biscuits - they're liable for VAT (which regular biscuits and cake (chocolate or otherwise) aren't).
It's your patriotic duty.
So, vulnerable funding for vulnerable road users, in a city vulnerable to air pollution & congestion from too many motorised vehicles on the road.
Too many polluting vehicles on the road. Ironically, buses are a large part of London's pollution problem whilst also being among the most space-efficient. Buses are hugely important to London though - cleaning them up, not getting rid of them, is the bigger part of the solution.
He comes across as incredibly uncommitted to cycling. Let's hope not, but the signs aren't good.