Can city cycling be safe?

Cycling in London has never been so popular. If you stand on one of its bridges during rush hour, you’ll see hundreds of cyclists streaming across on their way to work. Official figures show that 570,000 trips in London are made by bike every day, compared with 290,000 daily trips in 2001. There are now cycling cafés, events and even a new cycling commissioner (who, like the current mayor, is of course a cyclist).

And while cycling is encouraged by the authorities – in part to reduce demand on other transport modes – safe infrastructure has so far lagged behind its huge rise in popularity. But we could be standing on the verge of a big transformation of the capital's streets, in favour of greater safety. Policy makers in other cities are watching what’s happening in London closely.

Change has been driven, in part, by a grassroots movement of passionate and concerned cyclists, who have deftly used social media to consolidate their demands. The call for more to be done to make cycling safer reached a crescendo just before London’s 2012 mayoral election. There were a number of demonstrations that coincided with hustings, and The Times took the cycle safety campaign to a national audience. The mayoral election saw campaigners persuade all the candidates to commit to a safer cycling programme. Called 'Go Dutch', it borrows design ideas from the Netherlands, based around providing as many segregated cycle lanes as possible.

Conservative Boris Johnson won the election, and appointed a cycling commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, who is overseeing the scheme. Johnson's current policy is to invest £913m over 10 years in London’s cycling infrastructure. So far, change has not been in much evidence and this has attracted ongoing criticism and protests. Just one stretch of segregated cycle lane has been built in Stratford, east London. But there are big promises and big ambitions – and this means big policy changes in many transport areas...

Read on at Ethos Journal here

Ethosis aimed at public sector leaders, politicians, academics and policy specialists debating the future of public services today.