“Incredibly simplistic” to blame cycle lanes for London being named world’s most congested city

Agree with all this. Obviously without the cars there wouldn't be congestion - most of the traffic is motor vehicles both by number and area occupied. However on arguing the point: I don't think you can take it as a given that others will "see" this. An example was the excellent the Invisible Visible Man - a journalist and cyclist who eventually stopped doing much cycle-writing partly over angry debates on this particular issue with other cyclists.

In his case - agree or not - he was actually arguing from the data. However ther is a more widespread "blockage" / "knock on effect" idea out there too. There's the simpler expressions of this: "bikes go slower than cars so they hold people up" / "if there's one less lane then you can't shift half as many cars". But there's a more considered point which runs as follows. At certain times some of our roads will be operating at or near capacity over a large area. Cars don't flow as smoothly as water (e.g. you get waves as they start / stop) and some are constrained in their journey (e.g. either they have to go a certain way or are just reluctant to re-route - obviously sat navs complicate this too). So it doesn't take much delay / reduction in capacity to cause a significant effect. Because of the lack of spare capacity / lags in shifting cars into space this is then propagated through the system. So a relatively small local change to road capacity creates more widespread issues.

Ban the bikes for a week......and then ban cars for a week and compare.

Tubes and busses would be overrun , 🤣🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

kittybag wrote:

Surely if cycle lanes caused congestion then the most congested cities in the world would be Amsterdam and Copenhagen?

Ah but everyone knows that Amsterdam * is such a living hell for the motorist that no-one even tries. And in Copenhagen the roads are so narrow now there are cycle lanes again few motorists can bear it.

* Amsterdam is far from the best city for cycling in the Netherlands (according to the Dutch cyclists union). Utrecht, Groningen, Zwolle etc. normally top it.  - I'm always wary of polls and especially the "best cycling cities in the world" kind a) because organisations tend to give top prize to their own city (hello Copenhagen) and b) because the critera used to judge are very variable and sometimes seem a bit wacky - like they were thought up by journalists / civic officials who didn't actually do much "casual cycling".

mbrads72 wrote:

So the roads aren't congested because there are too many vehicles, it's because there aren't enough roads (to get congested) 

We just don't have enough roads. Think of all that countryside and woodland just lying about, no use to anyone. tarmac it over..

They paved paradise, to put up a parking lot.

Captain Badger wrote:

mbrads72 wrote:

So the roads aren't congested because there are too many vehicles, it's because there aren't enough roads (to get congested) 

We just don't have enough roads. Think of all that countryside and woodland just lying about, no use to anyone. tarmac it over..

We don' t actually have enough roads, cycling paradises such as the Netherlands have a much higher density of trunk roads than the UK and drive more miles. It's about selecting the most appropriate mode for the job, cars don't make sense for surface street journies in dense city centres, bikes don't make sense for intra urban journies. The UKs relatively poor trunk road network is almost certainly one of the major causes of the UK productivity gap between the UK and the continent.

As a % the amount of land under roads is pretty small, it just seems bigger because we mostly view the country from a road! In ecology terms it's pretty much a wash between a road and intensive monoculture farming which makes up much of our countryside.

In terms of CO2 new cars will all be electric by 2030 and we will have to solve for net zero for bulk materials (concrete, steel etc,) anyway, you won't achieve nearly enough impact by reducing usage and if you solve for net zero there isn't much of reason to reduce usage. Thus the idea that building roads locks in climate impact is not really true. Unfortunately it's much easier to campaign against a road scheme than it is in favour of more research into electrolysis of iron.

I'm sure somebody will make some argument for replacing cars with trains or similar. We already use rail as much as we ever did, we just do a lot more journies in total facilitated by road transport (around about 7X rail), unless you want to rely on hyperloops we would need to expand the railway network my many multiples of its existing capacity, the same goes for any other mode.

If you go out to East Anglia, the connections are not so good and they could do with some decent upgrades to the road network.

Net zero will be harder to attain with the volume of cars - circa 38m I read yesterday - and expected to rise by 28% by 2050 (where will they be stored ?!)

Some queries with this one:

massive4x4 wrote:

Captain Badger wrote:

mbrads72 wrote:

So the roads aren't congested because there are too many vehicles, it's because there aren't enough roads (to get congested) 

We just don't have enough roads. Think of all that countryside and woodland just lying about, no use to anyone. tarmac it over..

We don' t actually have enough roads

Why not? In that case we don't have enough anything, because we could have more and if we did some of the new stuff would probably get used - ergo we didn't have enough of it?

It's about choices / prioritising, no? We already know about induced demand.

massive4x4 wrote:

, cycling paradises such as the Netherlands have a much higher density of trunk roads than the UK and drive more miles.

I believe the Netherlands has more density of most things that go along with people, that being more ... dense. Do you mean a higher proportion of trunk roads relative to all roads? Or more trunk road miles per head of population?

I believe you're right about the Dutch travelling further on their commutes (2011) - not sure if this is all by car though. It might be.

massive4x4 wrote:

It's about selecting the most appropriate mode for the job, cars don't make sense for surface street journies in dense city centres, bikes don't make sense for intra urban journies.

Cars are often not optimal transport e.g. for short journies. Dense urban areas might work better if there were fewer cars (both parked and moving). Bikes can make perfect sense for  intra-urban journies - it just depends on distance and on making the conditions attractive to do so. What we definitely *don't* have enough of in the UK is safe and convenient provision for making those bike journies.

massive4x4 wrote:

The UKs relatively poor trunk road network is almost certainly one of the major causes of the UK productivity gap between the UK and the continent.

No idea if that's the case or not - citation needed! The UK has certainly spend decades prioritising not just road transport but road freight over other options. Does everything involved with "productivity" need a road though? Given our economy is structured differently from many European countries I'm not sure it follows.

massive4x4 wrote:

In terms of CO2 new cars will all be electric by 2030 and we will have to solve for net zero for bulk materials (concrete, steel etc,) anyway, you won't achieve nearly enough impact by reducing usage and if you solve for net zero there isn't much of reason to reduce usage. Thus the idea that building roads locks in climate impact is not really true. Unfortunately it's much easier to campaign against a road scheme than it is in favour of more research into electrolysis of iron.

Hmm - so you've checked all that electricity then and none is coming from fossil fuel power? What about all the emissions involved (from the vehicles / processes / materials) as we create all our new "zero emissions" power generation? It might well be a good switch - but not zero!

It does seem to be a human cognitive feature that "out of sight = out of mind". Remember - for "zero emissions" read "emit elsewhere". (yeah - "generate elsewhere" but we don't have "net zero" generation). Lots of our "clean technologies" and things to do with "electric" or even future hydrogen fuelled things seem to blindside otherwise critical thinkers.

As for iron electrolysis - that may be all good but note that its production still wouldn't a zero emissions process.

massive4x4 wrote:

I'm sure somebody will make some argument for replacing cars with trains or similar. We already use rail as much as we ever did, we just do a lot more journies in total facilitated by road transport (around about 7X rail), unless you want to rely on hyperloops we would need to expand the railway network my many multiples of its existing capacity, the same goes for any other mode.

Here you're (tangentially) on to something. Humanity has a long-running trend towards using more resources. That occurs even when we shift to a more efficient technology. (Nice bit about more cars through the decades using the same energy here). It's tricky to slow down the rate of increase - or even just plain travel less - but we do have a choice. It is possible to do a bit better than harm minimisation. People can cooperate so they avoid the tragedy of the commons / tearing through resources as fast as they can. Also the number of traffic isn't a given. There are examples of this in exactly the mode we're talking about - driving - see traffic evaporation.

https://blobby.wsimg.com/go/60c05181-e05a-4877-8212-f0729af8bbb8/Traffic%20Evaporation%20.pdf

https://thecityfix.com/blog/traffic-evaporation-what-really-happens-when-road-space-is-reallocated-from-cars/

sparrowlegs wrote:

Anybody know where London came in terms of cycling friendly cities? As long as it's somewhere near the top then I think that's a fair swap for the car congestion. 

I'd agree that might be a good swap and I suspect that a decent modal shift away from car use decreases congestion in the medium - long term even if you do that via decreasing road capacity.

These kind of polls are often... questionable. For example Copenhagenise runs / ran one which surprisingly always found Copenhagen to be at the top - here's a couple of Dutch / Danish video comparisons here and here). But I doubt London's particularly high.

You can have places which aren't particularly "cycle friendly" but where there is still a fair bit of cycling (e.g. cars are not affordable / restricted for some reason, motor traffic speed is low or there's demand for short distance / cheap / easily storable transport). Detail's important - see Tokyo and Beijing for example.

Modal share alone - wikipedia has sortable data. It notes that putting all this together has some issues (e.g. comparability of sources, does this overlook some important differences etc.)

Is it not the case that many of those other cities are more congested because they have wider roads with more lanes of motor traffic?

Almost all of those cities have wider roads with more traffic lanes than London. Beijing, which I know best of them, has multiple traffic lanes on its major routes. It does have a pretty good underground system, but it's incredibly busy at rush hour, far more so than the Tube in London. But Beijing has more than twice the population of London. Mexico City has a population estimated officially at about 21 million, but as so many people live in illegal barrios, it could easily be around 24 million or three times that of London in other words. And bear in mind that Mexico City's public transport system is pretty basic, so the roads are jammed. 

I remeber stood on my balcony at our hotel in cairo at midnight. The traffic outside the Museum of Antiquities was the worst I have ever seen. It was mayhem, not helped by most drivers driving with no lights on as it was considered rude to blind other roads users!

Spent 6 weeks in Cairo a lot of years ago and the 6th October Bridge was terrifying to say the least. Even regular roads were interesting as it was a case of lean on your horn and accelerate for the space. And if you weren't driving at speed it was a gradual crawl and slowly edging your way in to where you wanted. There was one night I vividly remember the guy driving muttered that we were in trouble. It turned out his horn had just packed in and we had now gone dark. 

agreed Id have certainly used much harser language of the one syllable variety, such that it could be easily digested and quoted by the tabloids promoting this myth and their readers might even understand it.

hirsute wrote:

Someone gets home and misses the start of emmerdale and that's a financial cost?

Well it is to ITV - fewer eyeballs - less ad revenue.

itv hub