Family bike ride draws attention to ‘carspreading’

Call to remove sports utility vehicles from city streets

Supersized SUVs reduce the space available for children and other vulnerable road users to cycle, walk and scoot.

Over 300 families rode through central London on 23 March to highlight the importance of making roads safer for children, pedestrians and cyclists.

Cyclists of all ages rode from South Bank to Brunswick Square passing Parliament, Downing Street and Trafalgar Square.

The theme of this year’s ride was ‘space’. It focussed on how children, cyclists and pedestrians being crowded out of space on the UK’s streets by supersized SUVs, highlighting research showing that SUVs cause 30% more deaths.

The ride was a collaboration of grassroots organisations including IBikeLondon, Streets for Kids and Solve the School Run who are part of the global Kidical Mass movement which last year saw over 200,000 participants in mass bike rides across Europe, the US, Africa and Australia.

IBikeLondon kept the atmosphere going and the bikers pedalling with music from their fleet of Disco Bikes.

Oliver Lord, UK head of Clean Cities, helped organise the ride. “We know that SUVs lead to more fatal crashes, cause more potholes and crowd out parking spaces,” he said. “No one would want to buy a car thinking it would be more dangerous for a child. We’re calling for central and local government to work on a plan that would save taxpayer money and generate revenue that can be invested in public transport, walking and cycling.

“For local councils that can be a system of parking charges where bigger or heavier SUVs pay a fairer share, or a review of vehicle tax to account for the damage that oversized SUVs do. We also need the car industry to step up. It doesn’t suit anyone – least of all car drivers – to have vehicles that are too big to park in our towns and cities.”

Nicola Pastore, a parent who lives in Lambeth, was at the ride with her three children. She said: “We know that SUVs are getting bigger and heavier every year, and that children hit by larger cars when walking and cycling are far less likely to survive.  As the parent of a highly active 9 year old desperate to start to navigate the streets on his own this is terrifying to me. As these cars get bigger, our children’s worlds are getting smaller as parents become too scared to let their children walk or cycle around  on their own. Nobody wins. We need councils and government to take action, to discourage cars this size in towns and cities.”