What will Boris Johnson do for cyclists?
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Version 0 of 1. PM should use his majority to push for investments, but he may lack the political bravery The election is over, Boris Johnson has an 80-strong majority to wield, and many are now wondering what the prime minister will do with all this power over the next five years. So here’s an idea: let’s look at what he plans for everyday cycling. Cycling? Yes, cycling. In political terms it’s not exactly Brexit or the NHS, and if you were to list the average voter’s national concerns it would probably struggle make the top 100. But I’d argue that for Johnson it is a bellwether issue, one that will point to whether he plans to use his majority boldly or complacently. Let’s start with the basics. You’d struggle to find a UK politician who would sincerely argue that more everyday cycling for transport would be anything other than very good. That argument is over. The benefits are vast, well-proven and ones I’ve detailed many times before, so I won’t get into the details. But in brief, if you could magically switch, say, 20% of car trips to bikes you would instantly have a country that was considerably healthier, more equitable, safer, less noisy, notably less polluted and with considerably lower emissions. The other point is that getting more people on bikes is not magic, or an issue of culture, weather hills or anything else like that. It’s about years, if not decades, of concerted action. Again, I won’t re-state the much-proved, but it’s a question of making riding a bike convenient and not only safe, but obviously, visibly safe. That leaves one barrier: the political will and bravery to push ahead with something because it is the right thing to do. Now, Johnson has done this before. During his second term as London mayor (2012 to 2016) he oversaw the construction of some genuinely good, separated cycling infrastructure, notably the north-to-south and east-to-west cycle “superhighways”, as they were branded at the time. Sure, much more could have been built, and London was initially subjected to Johnson’s first, pointless wave of blue-paint-only bike routes. But building the first separated routes took genuine gumption. Some elements of big businesses (take a shame-faced bow, Canary Wharf Group), the black cab trade and others lobbied furiously against the lanes. Johnson himself told me at the time that in his joint role as an MP as well as mayor he was regularly castigated by Tory backbenchers because roadworks for the east-west lane along Embankment delayed their taxi rides to parliament. None of this was perfect, and as Johnson also conceded at the time, it might have been better to start with the separated lanes in his first term (adding: “I probably wouldn’t have been re-elected, unfortunately.”) But it showed at least some political courage – with the caveat that it all happened when he was not seeking re-election. Much of the day-to-day arm-twisting came from Johnson’s then-cycling “tsar”, the journalist Andrew Gilligan, who genuinely understands how to create everyday cycling and why it is so important. Gilligan is now a Downing Street adviser, although he has vanished into complete public silence since taking up the role. While the Conservative manifesto was, frankly, pathetic on cycling – the mentioned figure for new infrastructure was slightly over £1 per person per year, less than the current budget – you can bet that Gilligan will be agitating for more. Will he succeed? No one can be sure, but I fear he will not. There seem to be two factors at play. The first is arguably the crunch issue for a government such as Johnson’s, which has (barring a political earthquake) a near-unassailable Commons majority and five years in which to enjoy it: do you play it safe and court the existing supporters, or pursue at least some bold policies? It is, of course, very early days, but I suspect Johnson will tack towards the former. On Brexit, his parliamentary mandate gives the prime minister scope to at least pay lip service to some form of losers’ consent – provide a sop or two to the 50%-plus of voters who backed Brexit-sceptic parties. Instead, the optics have been much more about shoring up the base, not least the symbolic idea of writing into law that the Brexit transition period must finish at the end of 2020. My other worry is the post-election Conservative focus on mollifying their newly-acquired voters, particularly in northern English seats. There is much talk of extra investment, particularly in “infrastructure”. Building bike routes counts as infrastructure, but when ministers use the term in a transport context they tend to mean more traditional – and much more expensive – things such as bypasses, roundabouts and rail lines. There is, of course, nothing wrong with building new rail or metro lines, and while there is a pressing need – not least the climate emergency – to move away from car use for shorter journeys, this will take time, and roads are also used by buses. But I fear that building safe cycling routes will be seen as a frippery, OK for those in big cities but an irrelevance for people in northern towns. This would be a huge mistake. It is true that, for now, in most UK towns barely anyone does cycle, usually around 1% of trips in total. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. The example here is not London, or even somewhere like Copenhagen. Instead, look to Odense, Denmark’s third-biggest city. It is not huge – a population of about 200,000 – and fairly spread out, with many households owning a car. In other words, it’s like lots of places in the UK. The difference with Odense is that decades of investment in cycle infrastructure and campaigns to encourage people to ride bikes means that in the city centre about half of all trips are made by bike. More than 80% of Odense’s children cycle to school and the official advice is that roads are sufficiently safe for those aged six or older to do so without an adult. Such statistics would transform a UK town, and entirely for the better. Yes, it’s a long game, but the evidence all points towards doing this. Will Gilligan persuade Johnson to be even slightly ambitious and far-sighted on this? I would be very happy to be proved wrong, but my guess is no. |