Cycling is important to the city and, albeit a minor mode, growing cycling is important. But growth seems unlikely to be achieved simply by the Mayor and his Cycling Commissioner overstating the importance of cycling as a mode and making overblown claims that cycling is booming when it isn’t. Rigorous analysis and policy making are needed and there hasn’t been any since Mayor Johnson and Andrew Gilligan's 2013 ‘Vision for Cycling in London’ report.
In this blog and two later ones I will try to show how TfL has access to good data that should enable the sound analysis and policy development that responsible authorities would undertake, how the existing data is being misused, (claiming trends, when it simply cannot be called a trend), and, hopefully, provide a basis for some thoughtful reflection.
TfL does a lot of things very well. One has been to establish the London wide cycle count in 2014 on which I was privileged to be briefed. It's disappointing that having this data and the officers to interpret it, there is so much spin and propaganda associated with the statistics of cycling and too little effort to understand and inform.
Analysis of the data shows that tweets like the one below talking about cycling booming and 200%+ increases in cycling associated with bike lanes is nonsense, at least in policy making terms. The tweet comes from an official spokesman of a public body and has distorted policy making, led to mistaken decision making and to a huge waste of public money and a much poorer bus service and pedestrian environment.
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| The 200% claim was based on comparing two weekends in February |
TfL has 8 years of data for central London and 7 years for inner and outer London. (Counts are separated into central, inner and outer London). The count is a gold standard count of cycles conducted across the whole of London with over 1000 count sites and over 2 million items of data. Central London is counted quarterly, inner and outer London annually. The count is taken on Monday to Friday, between 6am and 10pm.
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| Outer London count sites |
It is well known that cycling levels are subject to great variability. The DfT describes cycling as ‘having a relationship with the weather’. But levels are also subject to variability by season and day of the week. Tuesdays are busier transport days than Fridays which in turn are usually busier than weekend days. Schooldays are busier for all transport modes than non-school days.
To reduce this variability, though it can't be eliminated, the TfL count keeps clear of school holidays, compares the same quarter each year, counts each site across 16 hours on multiple days.
So it’s a great count designed for a London wide result of ‘kilometres cycled per kilometre of road’ (towpath, on and off-road cycle tracks etc. are included). Nevertheless there is a big health warning when comparing single sites and one count with the next. One year's increase or decline could be entirely due to the weather, road works etc. or just chance.
This is the first of three blogs and covers the central London counts.
Central London
There are over 200 inner London sites counted quarterly. Q2 & Q4 2020 & Q1 2021 are missing due to COVID. Q3 has been undertaken throughout. Central London has the highest density of cycling.
As an example, Appold Street is Hackney’s only central London site. Below is a chart derived from all the counts available and shows the gaps due to Covid. To a degree it shows the variation by season.
The second chart below uses the same data, but uses just the Q3 counts. It is more intelligible. It covers all 8 years including the only quarter, Q3, undertaken in 2020. So although there are fewer results, it reduces the seasonal variation.
More interesting are the counts from the 6 central London bridges. The Thames acts as a traffic cordon for all trips to and from the south of the river into central London and so provides a proxy for cycling activity in central London. Below are the Q3 counts from 2014 to 2021.
Below, covers the same time period, but just the morning peak hours (7am til 10am). And so you get a sense of commuter cycling, which constitutes a large part of all cycling, particularly in central London.
I have added all 6 bridge counts together which probably gives the best sense of the change in cycling levels in central London.
Finally all the quarter counts of each central London bridge and an average of the total 6 bridge counts on one chart. It is very obvious that cycling in central London hadn't boomed before or after Will Norman's 200%+ tweet.
An overall sense of the change in cycling in central London can also be gained by looking at the change (positive and negative) of all the 200+ central London counts. The median change (a type of average) between Q3 2019 and Q3 2021 is -17%. I removed a couple of outliers.
TfL’s Travel in London report 14, its annual statistical almanac, reports the overall cycle volume for central London as decreasing by 16.4% between 2019 and 2021.
Three more counts showing changes of large negative, large positive and zero percentage change in cycling count between 2019 and 2021.
Conclusion
It’s clear from looking at these counts that there has been not been a 200% + increase in cycling in central London associated with cycle lanes contrary to the claim made by the cycling commissioner in his tweet. Policy is being made at best on the basis of misunderstanding, at the worst it is deliberate distortion. Huge sums of public money are being wasted and misdirected when money could be usefully spent on more impactful ways to change travel behaviour and make our roads safer for everyone.
