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National survey reveals decline in cycling for leisure, sport and travelThe Smuggler

National survey reveals decline in cycling for leisure, sport and travel

Active Lives survey aims to provide snapshot of the nation’s sport and physical activity habits
by Alex Bowden
Fri, Apr 12, 2019 13:28
16

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.”

Active Lives
Sport England
Alex Bowden

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.

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16 comments

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Judge dreadful | 5 years ago
0 likes

Generation ‘there’s an app for that’ would rather waste time on indoor turbo trainer riding shock. Said no one ever.

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Luca Patrono | 5 years ago
4 likes

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.

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ktache | 5 years ago
1 like

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.

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John Smith | 5 years ago
1 like

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.

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Luca Patrono | 5 years ago
0 likes

Removed it. Would you mind editing the quote out of your comment? Thanks!

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burtthebike replied to Luca Patrono | 5 years ago
0 likes

Luca Patrono wrote:

My MP is Philip Davies. Not a good use of my time writing to him, I feel... Anyway. The cycling lobby in this country, in my opinion, fails to correctly identify the problems. I watched the Cycling UK representative at the House Select Committee a while back and it was the same line about potential bike users feeling unsafe or uneasy about riding on the roads - to which the solution is inevitably touted as "infrastructure". It's too narrow a view and it's the reason we're not getting as far as we should be. Zoom out of London, a place that is by my understanding mostly flat and heavily congested, posing a real risk that proper infrastructure can mitigate, and which is populated by the types of high-fliers who are more likely to consider bikes as a mode of travel. Fly across the country, centre over West Yorkshire, to the cities of Leeds and Bradford. Between Leeds and Bradford we have multiple viable routes: the Leeds-Liverpool canal towpath, the "cycle superhighway" that was completed three years ago and a few road routes that are solid options. And yet, what do we see? Almost nobody on the cycle superhighway. Few people on the towpath; in winter I rarely see another cyclist. The infrastructure exists here, and it's segregated, so what's the problem? It comes down to speed, hills, safety, initial fitness cost, security, ability to park and image. ------------------------------------------ - Speed: In congested cities, a bike can be faster. But not everywhere is London. If quieter roads are in the mix, a car is going to get to its destination first. People work enough as it is - tired people and non-cycling enthusiasts do not want to have any more downtime in their lives than they need. The electric bike looked like a solid solution to this problem - except the assist limit is 15.5mph, which is too low and should have been at least 20mph, if not higher. - Hills: In West Yorkshire we've plenty of them, and while cyclists like us don't care, the average person does. If you take the segregated cycleway from Bradford to Leeds, you've got a hill that would put off anyone considering jumping on a standard bike from Bradford (Broadway) to Barkerend top, where Habib's restaurant is. Coming the other way, you've got a hill from Armley to just past the fire station and various smaller ones on the way. Aside from making people push uncomfortably if they're starting out (and thus increasing the chance they'll say "sod this for a lark", hills make you SLOW. No one wants to be pushing 7-8mph on a hill that a car can push 40mph up for zero effort. - Safety: It's a product of speed as well as infrastructure. The slower you go, the more danger you're in (speed difference between cars behind you, as well as rage from drivers about "that slow cyclist holding me up.") - Initial fitness cost: I only started two years ago, but I remember I could barely get five miles at the time. I'm a young man and I wasn't particularly idle, either. - Security, ability to park and image: All of these are related. If I want to perform any kind of errand on my bike, I have to lock it outside. Firstly, I've got to hope that there's somewhere I can lock to, which is not guaranteed. Secondly, that limits the level of bike I can use if I want to avoid being an attractive target for thieving scum, and unless I'm riding a complete beater, I'm still at risk of having my bike stolen. That means that unless I can find secure indoor parking (hahahaha), I can't risk using an electric bike, which means I can't advocate that people buy electric bikes to deal with the problems I mentioned above. It also means that I can't ride a good bike if I want to keep it for very long. I have a family member who lives within cycling distance of their workplace, yet they drive to work and go to spin classes after work. Why? Image. They drive a luxury marque and are proud of it. Use a decent bike for any journey in which you don't have indoor parking and you can kiss it goodbye. ------------------------------------------ The focus is unduly on infrastructure. The cycling lobby needs to understand that until cycling as a mode becomes a superior option over driving then the numbers aren't going to change. In the short term, this cannot happen through action against drivers, because that loses votes and is seen as shoehorning / forcing adoption. Only once you have a high enough modal share to gain political influence can you actively punish driving, and in my opinion, the only way we're going to get there is through a combination of infrastructure, electric / assisted bike research and subsidy and secure cycle parking as an expected feature.

Any chance you can sum up your book in a few sentences so I can be bothered to read it please?

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CygnusX1 replied to Luca Patrono | 5 years ago
6 likes
Luca Patrono wrote:

Removed it. Would you mind editing the quote out of your comment? Thanks!

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.

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Capercaillie replied to Luca Patrono | 5 years ago
3 likes
Luca Patrono wrote:

Removed it. Would you mind editing the quote out of your comment? Thanks!

It's a shame you deleted it. I've seen longer posts on here that were well received. You made some really valid points.

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burtthebike replied to Luca Patrono | 5 years ago
2 likes

Luca Patrono wrote:

Removed it. Would you mind editing the quote out of your comment? Thanks!

More to the point, how did you remove it?

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HarrogateSpa | 5 years ago
5 likes

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.

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growingvegtables replied to HarrogateSpa | 5 years ago
3 likes

HarrogateSpa wrote:

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?

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burtthebike | 5 years ago
6 likes

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?

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BehindTheBikesheds replied to burtthebike | 5 years ago
1 like

burtthebike wrote:

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.

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burtthebike replied to BehindTheBikesheds | 5 years ago
1 like

BehindTheBikesheds wrote:

burtthebike wrote:

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,

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

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hawkinspeter | 5 years ago
13 likes

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

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BehindTheBikesheds | 5 years ago
6 likes

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

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