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The SmugglerNational survey reveals decline in cycling for leisure, sport and travel
Sport England’s annual Active Lives survey has found that while 498,100 more people (aged 16+) are meeting the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines of doing at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity a week, there has been a decline in the levels of cycling for leisure, sport and travel compared to the previous year. Indoor bike sessions did however increase.
Completed by 179,747 people between November 2017 and November 2018, the survey found that the number of people cycling for travel dropped by 98,000 to 3.1 million people, while the number of people cycling for leisure or sport was down by 257,000 to 6.1 million.
Roger Geffen, Policy Director at Cycling UK, pointed to a lack of government investment as being a major contributory factor.
“We know cycling has grown significantly in cities such as London, Manchester and Leicester that have been willing to invest in quality cycling infrastructure and restraining the growth of road traffic. Unfortunately though, these commitments have not remotely been matched by central Government. Hence it is hardly surprising that overall cycle use in England is, if anything, declining.
“If the Government wants to meet its ambition to double cycling trips between 2013 and 2025, it needs to drastically rebalance its transport spending plans, to support clean and healthy travel. It has a great opportunity to do so this summer, when it begins a three-year spending review.
“We will be campaigning alongside our walking and cycling alliance partners both inside and outside Westminster to make sure this happens.”
British Cycling Policy Manager Nick Chamberlin said the results made for “uneasy reading.”
“Our insight tells us that perceptions of safety and access to pleasant, traffic-free spaces to ride remain the biggest deterrents preventing more people from cycling.
“While cycling remains statistically safe, traffic speed, close passing or potholes can often make riding a bike in Britain intimidating and unpleasant, especially for those who are trying it for the first time.
“The impact of this is clear in the numbers of people still making short, cyclable journeys by car – with all of the associated consequences for congestion, air quality and physical activity.
“While efforts are now being made to improve roads for people on bikes at city level, most notably in London and Manchester and more recently in Sheffield and Birmingham, national government in Westminster needs to redouble its efforts and investment to achieve significant and sustained change nationally.”
One place where traffic is not a concern is of course indoors. Chamberlin said British Cycling was pleased to see “a moderate spike” in the level of indoor cycling, “and we hope that last month’s inaugural British Cycling Zwift eRacing Championships can help to further grow the profile of this discipline and encourage even more people to take part in the coming years.”
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
Latest Comments
- chrisonabike 33 min ago
I have a visual memory from childhood of one of this species of bricks popping loose from a bracket on a downhill section and flying away to smash ...
- wtjs 1 hour 22 min ago
There is an increasing 'disconnect' between comments in this topic and reality. Cords are either all cotton or mostly cotton and are going to last...
- ktache 1 hour 53 min ago
There are people out there who will make you the belt out of your old tyre.
- chrisonabike 1 hour 54 min ago
Furry dice and an air freshener for your helmet.
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Looking at the pictures in the linked article, the bikes aren't actually inconsiderately parked. The only issue is that they're on private property...
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16 comments
Generation ‘there’s an app for that’ would rather waste time on indoor turbo trainer riding shock. Said no one ever.
Thanks for the reassuring responses. I was a bit rash earlier, I know I can be verbose and I figured after the first reply that no one wanted to read through such a long comment.
I take your point on safety. Getting crushed by a huge car (and aren't they constantly getting bigger!) is going to hurt no matter what.
Luca Patrono, post long mate. Sometimes you cannot make a point in a soundbite. And it was a good read. I do disagree with you on your safety point, in my opinion it's less to do with the closing speed and more about the speed and mass of the excessivly overweight motor, being hit by a range rover at 40 is going to hurt a lot if you are stationary or if you are climbing at 10-15. And anything close to the speed limit will be too slow for many of them.
I disagree that new infrastructure is needed (at least on the road. More bike parking is needed). Whilst lots of people say that more segregated bike infrastructure would help them cycle I believe the opposite is true, at least as it currently stands. Segregated Infrastructure is nice, but you can’t have it cover the whole country. All more segregated infrastructure would do at the moment in the UK is reenforce the idea that cyclists should not be on the road. It would just increase the aggression from drivers when sharing space with them.
IMO what we need is to sort out the behaviour of drivers around cyclists, and also the behaviour of some cyclists. By which I mean that bikes need to be seen as a real form of transport and not a toy. I genuinely believe this is the route of a lot of the anger from drivers, but also the way some people cycle. Drivers who think that cyclists should not be on the road and cyclists who ride with no respect for other cyclists, pedestrians or other road users. (I suspect that these people are just as bad when driving though).
We need to address this first and make cycling be seen as a viable form of safe transport for all. No idea how we do this, but I would bet it is a much better ROI aim the UK at the moment. £10million would buy a few reworked junctions and a few miles of segregated bike lane, but could do a lot nationally if used to address close passes or other aggressive driving.
Removed it. Would you mind editing the quote out of your comment? Thanks!
Any chance you can sum up your book in a few sentences so I can be bothered to read it please?
I read it (in burts quote as you deleted it here) it made some good points and was no longer than many of BTBS's posts.
It's a shame you deleted it. I've seen longer posts on here that were well received. You made some really valid points.
More to the point, how did you remove it?
Boardman needs to be given time. He has been dynamic and got a lot of projects started, and we'll see what quality they are in a year or two. We might want 'perfect', but as long as we get 'decent' and 'usable', that will be a big step forward.
Come on. mate - that's so unfair to place the load on Chris Boardman's shoulers.
The bit that rankles ... "We'll see what what quality they are in a year or two"? Let me guess, it won't be Chris Boardman or the processes he's set in motion that will fail us, but the miserable cretins in Westminster?
Roger Geffen of CUK is right, and it comes down to money, and the government spends it all on ego schemes like HS2, with no economic case, and road schemes, which have a negative economic case. As CUK said about the government's Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy "Very little strategy and even less investment."
The government finds it useful to pretend that they are promoting cycling, it gives them brownie points for environment and health and pollution, but in practice they are pretty well effectively defunding it. Rather like the NHS, they claim to be spending record amounts while refusing to give it what it needs.
So who has written to their MP demanding action?
I have, many times, but he's a conservative cocksucker and a liar (regarding his stock answers to cycling investment) and the vast majority around here are exactly the same. They have a decent amount of brass on the whole, typical middle England and they don't give two fucks so keep on voting the tory wankers in. Sadly Labour are fucking useless too, in fact in most respects even worse. They would take the country down even further as they did under Blair/Brown nd we'd still get no investment in cycling.
BTBS, I'd have laid money on that, but who else? Complaining on an echo chamber like this is great for reducing the blood pressure, but doesn't actually acheive anything.
Hint to everyone else: stop whingeing and get writing to your MP, and don't even think about complaining about government inaction unless you have. Don't just leave it to CUK and BC, MPs ignore them but get concerned about the number of letters they get from constituents, so do it today.
Try this https://www.cyclinguk.org/current-campaigns/funding-walking-and-cycling
What BTBS said.
Rather than promoting cycling, we instead have a lord prancing around wanting to electronically tag all cyclists as though we are criminals.
Edit: poor word choice has been changed
Why is anyone surprised, there has been no progress in protection of people on bikes, in fact it's gone backwards. For all the investing in infra it's still woefully shit. Even the stuff in Manchester under CB is to be frank half measures and doesn't go remotely far enough IMHO, nowhere as far as I can see has what I would consider infra that meets a standard that is like a road but keeps motors out, such that it is easy. direct/non circuitous and unimpeded for the masses. The width is an issue for muliple speeds of cyclists, that' still only half of the story.
It's still too cheap and too easy to get places in towns and cities by motor and too difficult by bike, with rules put in place to stop people from cycling into or through town/city centres with the mostly unlawful PSPOs. There's little to no parking facilities anywhere, whether that's at a hospital because most of the land is used for car parking so there's not enough bike parking space and as per my own local hospital (which I visit frequently due to my lifelong ailment) the bike parking is simply a bag o shite in its design as well as not having enough nor placed in the right areas around the site anyways. There's hardly any secure parking in town/city centres, virtually none at sporting stadia, local shops, theatres/cinema, even train stations are simply not adequtely equipped!
Joined up travel, meh, just utterly pants.
Riding for leisure, well apparently several on here have said there are huge increases in club numbers, well that as maybe, but that's selective, we have seen from the figrues last year that there's been no increase in trips but a few more miles covered (hence the slight jump in total miles covered). Worst of all is that cycling for schools is still in the dark ages, and when you have headteahcers putting onus of safety and blame onto kids instead of addressing the real issues you again put a barrier up, that's before you even get to the issue of secure/enough cycle parking at schools.
There are literally hundreds of things that could be done but aren't, procrastination, plain ignorance and also worse a wilful stance to do anything but focus on cycling to get the nation going in the rught direction as a whole. I simply don't get it, increased cycling WILL save tens of billions on the NHS alone every single year, it has so many upsides