Chancellor urged to open up Cycle to Work Scheme to lower-paid and self-employed workers

Agreed word for word; although you rely too much on facts and logic and too little on emotion. I don't expect the ideas to get traction until you explain how this helps 'the hardworking majority seeking to go about their everyday lives.'

Some good points. An adult paid at NMW (£9.50/hr) and working full time 37.5hrs/week will earn £18k+ per year, plenty enough to save tax and NI.

Where it gets tricky if if the employee is younger and/or works fewer hours. The low pay commission estimates 7% of the UK workforce is paid at NMW so it's a big issue.

My solution is for the employer to raise the employees salary above NMW by the amount the employee wishes to spend on a bike, which of course will never happen.

Any reduction in VAT would give a short finanical boost but would soon be negated by price increases (bikes have gone up by 20% in the last year alone).

RobD wrote:

If the government were really serious about getting people on bikes they could lower (or remove) VAT on bikes as well, the overall savings to the uk economy would outweigh the cost by far.

That's a great idea. I've never been able to make use of these salary sacrifice schemes as they seem overly convoluted and the company I work for figured it was too much hassle for them. (To be fair, I'm not really the target for these schemes as I already cycle).

Exactly what I was going to say. Reducing VAT benefits all and encourages people to make healthy choices.

Yup!  Sign me up.  One caveat - merely making bikes cheap (or even giving people them) doesn't make them cycle. People have to have somewhere that feels safe and is convenient for their journeys.

Cycling can be a virtuous circle but it's a bit hard to break into from where we are.  The benefits come when you've got "mass cycling".  I'm not sure what percentage of journeys that would be but at a few percent the UK's quite a long way from it. I think I definitely know it when I see it though.

Impediments: the government, civil servants, councils and some businesses.  Many people just don't understand cycling, how it can help and how best to let it grow.  It's actually not quite as easy as riding a bike.  Sadly not only is government not serious about getting people on bikes. (Indeed almost no parties are).  A sizeable fraction of those in positions of power feel that cycling is at best a "nice to have" irrelevance and there are a few who are utterly convinced it's actively harmful.

You are correct. Historically, the cost of buying a bike has not been in any of the reasons why people do not cycle:

https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/wiki/barriers-cycling

However, the rise of electric bikes will change this (see page 20 here):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tlw0oH-dMm8b8cUT46Z0ryz2YhL3MxHg/view

holtyboy wrote:

Historically, the cost of buying a bike has not been in any of the reasons why people do not cycle:

https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/wiki/barriers-cycling

Caveat: It's not immediately clear from any of that whether anybody was asked about cost. Some of them may have been open questions - can't really tell without digging deeper than what's there - but if they were asked to select reasons from a list we can't really conclude anything about factors that weren't included.

Assuming it's true, though - paradoxically, that doesn't necessarily mean that giving people bikes / subsidising purchases won't encourage people to cycle / cycle more. Because humans are weird like that.

We can be pretty confident it's not price.  People were keen in China to get a Flying Pigeon even when it was really expensive AND you needed some contacts.

If you give people anything you'll probably see a temporary increase in use of that thing.  The problem is wanting to modify the behaviour of most (or at least a significant minority) of people over the longer term.  Additionally you might find that you did get more cycling for a longer period but now everyone now rides on footpaths / parks / the few car-free spaces and there's massive conflict with pedestrians / each other. And everyone still does all their previous car journeys by car.

So "no data"?  Look for "natural experiments" - so look in other places or at different times.  Wind back the UK clock and cycling was not just a major transport mode but the main one (by distance I believe.  Sorry - I can't find the graph for that just now but see here and there's one since the 50's below).  Bikes were cheaper than now but relatively more expensive I believe.  But price wasn't the issue.  Cars were not readily available to the masses in e.g. the 1920s and 1930s.  The roads had become better and they weren't swamped by cars.  So bikes were the most convenient mode for shorter journeys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share#/media/File:Transport_modal_share_from_1952-2014.png

(Also at the government's site)

To be clear, I'm not saying that (a) price is stopping people cycling, or (b) cycle subsidy schemes will increase cycling (still less 'the right kind of cycling'). Only that (a) you can't conclude either from the information on that Cycling Embassy page, and (b) price not being a factor in people not cycling doesn't necessarily entail that subsidy can't result in more cycling (reduced price =/= same price + subsidy, because psychology).

In other words, I wasn't saying 'no data' - rather 'better data needed than what's been provided'.

Apologies - I did understand and meant to replace "no data" with "not conclusive" but missed it.  I still think that cost - if not irrelevant - is clearly low on the list of reasons why everyone's not cycling already.  I read somewhere (no ref, sorry...) that something like 40% of households already have bikes.  Why aren't they cycling everywhere?  I bet lots of kids have bicycles which they don't cycle to school on - why could that be?  Cars cost more than bicycles - but people buy cars.  (And cycling infra is a lot less costly than new roads...)  I'd say UK history is a good enough example for us to move on to look at much more significant conditions for cycling first.

No changes to bikes alone (cheaper, more shops, electric assist, roof) will change the status quo in the UK - short of making something which is really a car.  People will of course do expensive things they don't enjoy if it's the fashion. However they've been shown to vote with their feet when it comes to cycling (or indeed walking) in traffic.  Most just won't cycle unless it feels safe ("subjective safety").  (I know as far as the numbers go it's actually a very safe activity even now in the UK.) And in the UK it currently feels unsafe plus inconvenient and people think you're odd.

So we need multiple things to happen which can reinforce each other.  I agree that having better access to "bikes suitable for everyone" [1] [2] [3] [4] is part of the picture, as is making cycling for transport a normal thing in the culture or "desireable".  Those won't do much in isolation though.

Agreed. But we've had new cycle infra built around the country for lockdown so it would be best if they were being used as much as possible in order to best weather the anti-cyclist backlash.

While most of that new infra needs improvement sadly if it isn't being used 'enough', for better or worse, it's more likely to be removed than improved.
And once that happens any mention of new proper cycle infra gets answered with "we already tried that and it didn't work."

I agree - but that's always been the sticking point.  Chicken and egg of "nobody cycles, so why should we put in proper quality infra?".  A counter is "latent demand" - Covid-times were an interesting "natural experiment" but unfortunately being exceptional in several different ways it's not going to convince people.  Luckily we can always use the examples in several countries quite close by - helpfully at several different stages of development [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6].

But yes - sadly Covid-infra was not specifically bike infra and was always going to be compromised. It did nothing to change the mentality that cycling just needs "encouragement", or that you can get this done on a "footpath"-level budget, or it must be done without compromising access for motor vehicles (read - no change in capacity).

Parts!

Keeping the already used bicycles going, doing up the ones already owned and unridden, refurbishing the 2nd hand.

Double down on the environmentally soundness too.

That's what I should have said!  No doubt someone more economically literate will be along to tell us this is akin to inviting "charity-shop blight" (because growth or nothing, right?) but for me reduce, reuse first. And actually in many places - out of need - second-hand, scavenging and fixing plays an important and useful role.

Props to my local one too: https://thebikestation.org.uk/edinburgh/