Cyclists make up a quarter of London traffic, official census finds

Go Boris Go!! Anyone.....?

"bike provision in London still largely reflects the old idea of cyclists as a tiny, irrelevant minority." It's a good thing that someone (other than an activist) is challenging this.

It would seem we are on the cusp of a new era in London's history. There is now leadership as well as funding in place to make a real and measurable shift in the way Londoners use the roads. The next few years should be brilliant.

You've rather fallen for this. The count is of vehicles, ie wheeled objects, not people. Theobalds Road is the busiest cycling road in London - it's the highway to the hipster heartlands of Hackney and Islington - but cyclists are certainly not a staggering 64% of peak hour road users. It's also on four bus routes, with about fifty buses an hour during the peak. That probably means cyclists constitute 15-20% of road users, which is still great news.

Part of the problem may be inm the way many commuter journeys are recorded by the 'core' mode of transport, so that a commuter arriving by rail at Waterloo, and cycling to The City is recorded as a rail traveller in the National Travel Survey, but is a cycle user for the part of the journey made between train and office.

I've monitored cycle-rail use pretty closely for over a decade, and urge others to do spot surveys on the trains e, and at the stations they use. With CTC staff, and others passing through Waterloo we estimate that well over 1000 bikes per hour flow out during the morning peak, of which 50-60% are folding bikes, and others are parked overnight or from the 300 or so Barclays Bikes going out every morning.

On the trains the low figures quoted by various passenger surveys are seriously skewed by the fact that huge numbers are travelling on commuter trains at peak timers when bikes are often banned, but outside those times I'm consistently getting counts of around 10% of the passengers on a train with bikes - even some peak time services (eg Bristol-Cheltenham, Sheffield-Leeds, several trains to Cambridge) have bike carrying % up in the 10% range, as do reverse flow services from London, and when you observe passengers on the train (as I do occasionally on the Haddenham-Marylebone service) you can see around 10% with the indications that they will have cycled at some point on their journey to work (clues like panniers, pumps, helmets, cycling jackets etc) - no great surprise at Marylebone as 5% of commuters make their onward journey by bike from this station, and they have recently more than doubled their cycle parking capacity.

Blackfriars Bridge gets a substantial cycle traffic from those replicating the Waterloo & City Tube line, many of whom 'converted' in 2007 when the line shut for 6 months and cycle use at Waterloo 'exploded' jamming all the available racks solid with bikes overnight. From just 30 spaces at the key parking location in 2002 we now have over 300 - a 1000% increase in capacity, and still growing. St Pancras has seen a similar effect with a 2000+% increase in parking provision between 2004 and the current position. Marylebone shines here as the station has had registration for bikes parked by regular users for nearly 2 decades, and is moving forwards with an enhanced system of managing the use of their cycle parking.

Thankfully (at last) most train operators and Network Rail are beginning to realise that the cycling connection at each end of a journey is a requirement of a significant number of passengers, who want clear and consistent information and delivery of a well thought through 'product' that enables them to use a bike at one or both ends of a rail journey, and that may well be through more than one solution.

We also have the need for parking bikes and the exemplar of Glasgow, where since 1995 the Council has been installing and monitoring 200-300 on-street cycle parking spaces per year, and measuring over 30% year on year growth at some locations. In one instance a single bike parked in 1995 has now grown to a 48 space covered parking facility - often filled during the day. Across the city the daytime use of cycle racks shows a massive but insidious use of bikes, and many are simple 1 or 3-speed machines, very obviously for basic everyday use.

Do send me any counts that you may have done on train or at station, maybe you can beat the record of Pollards Hill Cyclists who managed to provide 70% of the passengers on a train one Sunday, when they set off out from London for a rail-assisted bike ride.

This is interesting, not for the 64% headline, but the comparison with 'traffic'. You'd read this and think that London was some mini-Holland. The problem is it's a comparison with ***Traffic*** - i.e. cars. As we know cars make up a very small % of how people get around London

If you look at how many people use bikes to get to work, it's a measley ~4% - http://cyclelondoncity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/in-hackney-more-people-who...
- so yes, put far more funding into bikes and not cars. But to see handing bikes 64% of the current overall 'traffic' budget (we wish) would be misguided. To realise the health benefits of cycling and reduce pressure on public transport, the target should be 50% of *all* journeys by bike - including those 6.5M per day or whatever by public transport.