Get Britain Cycling: what will it take?

What role do designers have in answering this question, currently the focus of a Parliamentary inquiry?

There is the will in Brighton, so there is a new cycle way: Old Shoreham Road

There is the will in Brighton, so there is a new cycle way: Old Shoreham Road

A high-speed roundabout with added green bits in Southampton: "Only the Brave".

A high-speed roundabout with added green bits in Southampton: "Only the Brave".

The council is consulting on a signalised alternative, based on what’s been proven to work in Copenhagen

The council is consulting on a signalised alternative, based on what’s been proven to work in Copenhagen

As you may or may not know, the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group is currently conducting an inquiry that is examining the barriers that are preventing more people from cycling in the UK; and this week I was one of a number of people giving the APPCG my four penn’orth as to the street design changes that I think will be needed if a lot more Britons are ever to cycle more often.

If you’ve no idea what All Party Parliamentary Groups are, they’re unofficial groups comprised of backbench MPs and Peers that cover subjects of general interest to Members from all parties. There are roughly 600 groups, about a quarter of which relate to different countries around the world. The rest cover all sorts of topics including cycling and, for example, folk arts. It pains me to report that there was once (in 2007, at least) an APPG on urban walking, but it no longer exists. That Parliamentarians seem less concerned about the quality of the urban walking environment than cider (yes, there’s a group for that), is a reflection of a problem I last wrote about in LTT597.

Anyway, turning to the matter at hand, what I found myself doing in preparing my evidence about design was to focus on the designers; by which I mean the people, like you and me, who have been, are and will be in some way responsible for the design of streets. I thought this important because the simple fact is that the challenge we face in ‘Getting Britain Cycling’ is not that a range of potentially appropriate design solutions is unknown: there are many measures used in countries such as Holland and Denmark that have got the Dutch and Danes cycling in very large numbers. So what is holding us back? Well, it seems to me that there are at least the following answers to that question:

1. Most of us have been trained in a professional environment in which ‘the car is king’ and the default in terms of street space allocation has been for motor vehicles.

2. The idea of allocating street capacity for a user group (‘would-be cyclists’) that currently constitutes a flow of zero has typically been discounted as ‘an obvious waste of money’.

3. Where the opportunity has arisen to improve conditions for cycling, we have tended to focus on measures that improve conditions for those who are already cycling.

4. The many designers who do not cycle often don’t appreciate the type of measures that would be genuinely beneficial for cycling. How else to explain so many of the rubbish cycle facilities out there?

5. Designers who do cycle have often failed to appreciate the concerns and requirements of those who do not. Essentially, we think it’s safe enough; they’re sure it’s suicidal madness.

6. Conventional approaches to road safety are fixated on reducing the numbers and severity of injuries – ‘the facts of danger’. Addressing ‘the perceptions of danger’ (for which there are no stats) has tended to be regarded as solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

7. We generally don’t have a good appreciation of what works in others countries, or why. When we’re exposed to certain techniques or ideas from abroad, without having actually experienced or understood them for ourselves, the instinctive reaction is often, ‘we couldn’t do that here’.

8. We often can’t, of course, ‘do that here’, even if we wanted to: because some design techniques are outlawed by current UK regulations.

9. Until recently, hardly anyone has wanted us to help get Britain cycling. Even now, the ignorance, indifference and sometimes hostility of politicians and the public when it comes to encouraging cycling is a huge constraint on design.
   
   

What seems clear from experience elsewhere is that the key change needed to encourage mass cycling is that we should design cycle tracks that give users the greatest possible actual protection, and sense of protection, from motor traffic. The problem with implementing this change, though, is that the phrase ‘greatest possible’ is a highly loaded one. It implies that there are constraints on what can be done, and of course there are: typically one or more of funding, physical, institutional, regulatory, political and operational. However, my own experience is that, where the responsible authority is genuinely committed to improving conditions for cycling, then where the ‘greatest possible’ line is drawn is in a quite different place from where more recalcitrant authorities would have it drawn.

In other words, whether or not we implement the design changes needed to get Britain cycling will not just be down to the designers but to the nature of the political and professional environment within which they work. Mass cycling in Britain will only arise if the Government and local authorities seriously want it, and if they therefore equally seriously increase both the street capacity and the proportion of transport funding allocated for it. And that will inevitably be at the expense of provision for motor vehicles.

I have been wondering, as you may have been, exactly what the APPCG inquiry might actually achieve. Will it just turn out to be an event that momentarily raised the hopes of many, only for them to be dashed as the Government kicks any prospect of radical change into the long grass? I sincerely hope not, and in doing so offer my very best wishes to my fellow LTT columnist Phil Goodwin, whose task it is to compile the inquiry report.

As a street designer, one particular change that I hope the inquiry might lead to is that the Government would require the Department for Transport to sit down with a group of experts to completely rethink the laws, regulations, standards and guidance that impinge upon provision for cycling. To be able to see what works in other countries and not to be able to do that in Britain because ‘the book says no’ must henceforth be considered unacceptable. 

LTT is organising the 2-day exhibition and conference: Cycle City Expo in Birmingham on the 25-26 April 2013