12. Cycling England

I’ve come to Exeter because it’s one of six English ‘Cycling Demonstration Towns’, and other than my home town, the only one needing no deviation from a standard End to End route. Like Lancaster, Brighton, Darlington, Derby and Aylesbury, Exeter is experimenting with ways of getting – to use Cycling England’s line – ‘more people cycling, more safely, more often’. The six towns have been tasked to develop exemplary physical environments for cycling, to raise cycling levels, and to share lessons learnt along the way. I’m keen to see how things are going.

I suppose I should tell you that I’m not optimistic.

Why?

Let’s start with money. Cycling England devised the demo towns project for very practical reasons. The Government gave it £5 million per year, to get England on its bike. That’s so pitifully little that Cycling England sensibly decided to target its efforts in a few places, where it sought to raise spending to the kind of level found wherever cycling is taken seriously. In the Dutch city of Groningen, for example, where well over half of all journeys are made by bike. Cycling England hopes to demonstrate to the Department for Transport how investing a sensible amount in cycling will produce more journeys by bike. And then it wants more money, for more cycling.

This sounds good. Better, Cycling England has managed to persuade Government of its case. Results from Exeter and the other first wave of demo towns have convinced the Government of the worth of extra support for cycling. In a massive funding increase, £140 million is being spent on, among other things, a second wave of ten cycling towns and one cycling city.

But let’s get this in perspective. £140 million sounds a lot. Until you think, ‘that’s for the whole of England, for three years. Until you learn that £140 million would barely cover the costs of the three-and-a-bit miles of just one road the Government plans to build, between the M6 and Heysham, a road I know a bit about because it’d be in my back yard.

On paper, Government thinks bikes are cool, cars are rubbish. It’s there in the policy documents. So Government makes a big fanfare of its increased support for cycling, from diddly squat to simply squat. Meanwhile, it continues to spend vast amounts of money on maintaining the great car economy. It’d be darkly comic, were it not so pathetically sad. Sustainability? Progress towards any such vision is so painfully slow, we’ll all be long dead.

Then there’s the message. I wonder about that too. The first six places to receive funding are ‘cycling demonstration towns’. The next crop are simply ‘cycling towns’, and one ‘cycling city’. What do these terms make everywhere else? ‘Non-cycling towns’? A ‘non-cycling city’? Places not to ride? The ‘cycling town’ tag risks giving the impression that everywhere else is a cycling desert. We don’t have to proclaim Birmingham a ‘driving city’, we know that already, thanks very much. Sure, cycling’s seen better days. And it will again, irrespective of what the bureaucrats do. In fact, cycling’s resurgent – London hosting the grand depart of the 2007 Tour de France, more and more cyclo-sportives, the renewed popularity of track cycling. Yet people paid to boost cycling can give the impression that cycling would not happen were it not for them, as if they’re responsible for cycling and somehow ‘in charge’ of its future. Which is of course complete nonsense.

The really bonkers thing about Cycling England, though, is this: it aims to promote cycling by encouraging people to get on a bike, when everyone knows you first need to get them out of the car. To me anyway, it seems obvious that the sooner we stop talking about ‘promoting cycling’ and start talking about ‘deterring driving’, the sooner we’ll get somewhere.

Specifically, I fear that what the cycling demo towns project might be demonstrating is how to sneak cycling in a bit more at the edges of a system which continues to be dominated by motoring-as-usual. When what it ought to demonstrate is how to get cycling to the very heart of our lives, towns, cities.

Cycling professionals try to sell cycling without taking driving off the shelves. But you can’t do it. It’s cars which stop people from cycling, perhaps because they’ve got one, almost certainly because they’re scared of the idea of being a cyclist surrounded by them.

Look at The Netherlands and Denmark and what you very quickly realise is that in the UK we’re nowhere near interventionist enough in our efforts to get people cycling. Increase bike parking, but also reduce car parking. Provide more space for riding bikes, but also take away space for driving cars. Build a cycling network, but at the same time start to dismantle the driving network. It’s as though we’re not actually trying to get people cycling, but instead merely to cajole them gently and tentatively in the right general direction of an increased proclivity to thinking about and maybe, one day in the not-too-distant future, if it’s sunny and warm and the cars have gone home for the day, giving cycling a go. In the meantime, of course, everything else – the decisions of government, the mass media, the lifestyles of the rich and famous – continues to push people towards cars.

So perhaps what we need is not so much Cycling England; that places too much emphasis on technical measures to make people more likely to start cycling. Perhaps what we need instead is Stop Driving England, which places emphasis on technical measures to get people out of cars. After all, one cycle lane might generate absolutely no cycling journeys, especially if it’s rubbish. But one bollard, even if it’s a bit wonky and looks ugly, so long as it’s reasonably solid and well located, can stop a thousand cars.

At every level of UK Government, civil servants seem completely incapable of envisaging cycling futures. They remain enamoured with the great car economy, the mantra and the myth that the route to economic competitiveness lies down the biggest road. And for as long as Government thinks this, it will keep providing it, and most people’s feet will remain firmly on automobility’s accelerator. It is Government which must engage the clutch, apply the brake, move down through the gears, and bring the great lumbering dinosaur of automobility finally to a halt.

Current attempts to get people on bikes are really spineless. Britain has yet to get down to serious bike business. I don’t want to knock Cycling England; it’s doing the best it can. What I want is to see the British Prime Minister, in fact the entire Government Cabinet on bikes, showing the way. Nothing less will do. If the Government’s so supportive of cycling, why’s it still not riding?

So you could say, I suppose, that I’m not really entering Exeter in the right spirit. Whilst I realise the city is supposed to be demonstrating how to increase cycling, I’m arriving suspicious that it’ll really be demonstrating how to piss around at the fringes of a road environment on which the car must remain king. That said, I’d dearly love my scepticism to be proved wrong.

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