It's great but is the statistic referring to the City of London or Greater London since that's a big difference? (City of London being a small part of Greater London). The video talks about and shows lots of areas of London that aren't the City. But the specific wording of the title makes me think they might be overstating things since it would be much easier to achieve in just the City since a lot of people don't drive there anyway.
post
This is one of the best pieces of cycling propaganda I have ever seen, I love it. Personal car ownership in central London has become so diabolical even the English are putting down their car keys and picking up a bike. I cycled in London for the first 20 years of my life and watched it become completely dominated by cars. It's strange to hear them say the words, as if it's some sort of fever dream. People fundamentally enjoy and benefit from cycling in a way that they never will behind the wheel of a car. Makes me hopeful for the future.
London (UK), Toronto, Montreal, Paris, all the Netherlands...
So many cities proving that cycling infrastructure can get people out of cars. Yet, cycling infrastructure in most of Canada is either no longer being built or torn down.
Incredibly maddening, especially when drivers complain about traffic, yet here's a cheap and easy solution for any city.
Edit: expanded
Conservatives love forcibly imposing their lifestyle on people in the name of "freedom." It's amazing how successful they've been in getting people to buy into their ass-backwards logic.
Only Conservatives could call "freedom" sitting in a metal cage, surrounded by others in metal cages, when "woke" alternatives (like walking!! 🫢) are freely available to them. There is no logic, only self-harm and the harm of others.
Being stuck in a traffic jam (that you're only contributing to) counts as freedom, whereas on a bike, you can just wheel your bike past the jam then be on your merry way.
Who has more freedom again?
It really does surprise me that letting a metal box insulating you from the world is what carbrains consider tough and FREE, whereas a bike, that you power with your OWN LEGS is sissy and WOKE! They have it so backwards!
Maybe it'd be helpful to piggyback some buy Canadian attitudes? Because if this keeps up for the next 5 years Canada will be way behind the US on cycling. Right now it's a shame, but given time it will become genuinely shameful.
The City of London is the one square mile in the centre that consists mostly of office space, at a fairly high density, and not the entirety of London. Bicycles outnumbering cars there is just common sense, and shouldn’t be remotely controversial. (Parking there would probably be a massive headache, for one.)
With other boroughs of London, it’s a lot more varied. Westminster and Chelsea, for one, is very different, with its council vetoing bike lanes the Greater London council planned to run through it, as its wealthy residents don’t want them taking road space away from their Land Rovers and Porsche Taycans or bringing the wrong kinds of people through their neighbourhoods.
Appreciate this is the cycling community already but even if you expand the definition of city of London to mean the full inner city (zone 1, say) it should still not be controversial for bikes to outnumber cars.
The point here is that the City of London has put in some pretty serious bike infrastructure which they started since the pandemic. It's not all perfect but it's better than it was, especially the junction around bank station, which was an accident hotspot for years
I was keeping in mind the same caveat, that City of London ≠ Greater London. But still, cycling is up by a huge amount, and car traffic is down. So what they're doing is working! It's another example to point to to show that if you build cycling infrastructure people will use it.
The video also spends a lot of time looking at ridership increases in Hackney. It's another small part of Greater London (although much larger than City of London), but it's more progress, and shows off strategies that are working in residential areas. It looks like Hackney has encouraged cycling by creating "low traffic neighborhoods", where they use traffic filters to close residential streets to through-traffic.
Sometimes you hear arguments against large investments in bike infrastructure along the lines of, "Biking works for Holland, but we don't have a bike culture here." Examples of cycling trending up in more places helps to make the case for infrastructure elsewhere.
My dream for San Francisco. Will probably have to wait for all the nimbys to die first though
all 3 comments