The mayor tries to tempt more Londoners onto two wheels
By D.K
EVERY morning, I cycle to The Economist’s offices over Vauxhall Bridge, first passing under a dim railway bridge near to the odd, silvery bus station. At around 8.45am, there are usually plenty of other cyclists—luckily—because it is not the easiest part of my commute. As well as various cars, motorcyclists and so on, an awful lot of rather large lorries seem to pass under the same bridge around the same time as I do. When, in a previous job, I often cycled the same route at 6am, it was terrifying.
That fear—and every cyclist in London knows it—explains why Boris Johnson, the mayor, yesterday morning announced plans to charge lorries without sidebars (which stop cyclists being dragged under the wheels) £200 to enter London. There have been a spate of injuries and deaths recently on London’s roads, with lorries disproportionately involved. Shortly after Mr Johnson made his announcement, a woman died in West Dulwich after yet another collision with a lorry. Over the past four years, heavy goods vehicles were involved in 53% of cyclist deaths in London.
Yet as I have been at pains to point out in the past, despite the recent tragic deaths, London is not a death trap for cyclists. Last year 14 people died, whereas over half a million journeys on bikes were made each day. Between 2011 and 2012, the number of deaths and serious injuries in the city fell (though the number of deaths nationwide increased). London’s relatively high number of cyclists, and the slowness of its traffic, ensures some relative safety. Though it has recently ticked up slightly, the overall number of cyclist casualties per million miles cycled is still half of what it was in the 1990s.
So the problem is just as much that London doesn’t feel safe to cycle through—at least, not in the way that say, Oxford and Cambridge do. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people like me hurtle around Vauxhall, or over the equally terrifying Elephant and Castle roundabout, or until recently, the Bow roundabout in East London. But hundreds of thousands more idle on buses or cram into Tube trains, unwilling to brave crowded and smoggy roads.
And those who are put off are disproportionately women. In Britain as a whole, men cycle four times more than women, and richer men cycle more than poorer ones. Wait at a busy London junction on a bike at 8am and you will see an awful lot of sinuous lycra-clad men on expensive racing bikes. Women are somewhat less common. In any other big British city, the situation is even worse.
And though cycling has increased in recent years, that gender disparity hasn't changed much. Arguably, cycling has grown most among people who actually slightly enjoy the rush of sneaking around cars at traffic lights and roaring ahead when the lights turn green. Among those, you can count Mr Johnson, who once complained that if he started wearing a cycle helmet, he would be “denounced as a wimp, a milquetoast, a sell-out to the elf and safety lobby”.
But what Boris has clearly worked out is that it’s not all about him. Making cycling safer—whether it is by introducing separated bicycle lanes, or by banning HGVs—is not just about preventing the occasional death. It is also all about reducing the fear factor. The proof of success will be when grandmothers and families with children take to London's roads, not just lycra-clad men and women.
