Lowri Griffiths Navigates the Capital’s Infrastructure Revolution With the Measured Perspective of Someone Who Owns Neither a Car Nor a Bicycle

London’s New Cycle Lanes Are Wonderful Unless You Are Trying to Drive, Park, or Not Be Hit

London has been building cycling infrastructure at a pace that would make Amsterdam modestly impressed and that has made several Kensington residents so furious they have started writing to the Evening Standard again, which I thought had stopped accepting letters in 2019 but apparently has not. The city has installed approximately 200 kilometres of protected cycle lanes since 2019, removed 12,000 parking spaces to accommodate them, and produced a cycling culture that is more visible, more used, and more generationally diverse than at any point since the invention of the car made the whole enterprise seem suicidal.

My Position

I am in the unusual position of supporting cycling infrastructure while also having been nearly hit by a cyclist on three separate occasions in the past month, which creates a philosophical nuance that the cycling advocacy community does not always have the bandwidth to accommodate. The first near-miss was at a junction in Islington where the cyclist went through a red light at a speed that suggested they were either very confident or had not noticed it. The second was on a pavement in Hackney, where the cyclist was technically in the wrong place and knew it and made eye contact with me to confirm this and then continued. The third was actually my fault, which I am including for balance.

The infrastructure is good. The behaviour it’s meant to incentivise — getting people onto bikes, out of cars, breathing better air, living longer, creating a city that functions better — is good. The specific cyclists who have passed within centimetres of me at speed in the past thirty days are not the argument against cycling infrastructure but are the argument for better enforcement, better design of junctions where cyclist and pedestrian paths intersect, and the general acknowledgment that adding infrastructure without adding the education and enforcement that makes it work is how you get a cycle revolution that everyone supports in principle and nearly everyone has a specific grievance about in practice.

London life and politics at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. London transport at City A.M.. Further at santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky. London satire at The Daily Mash.

The Infrastructure Question

The honest answer to London’s cycling infrastructure debate is that it is working, on the metrics it was designed to improve. Cycle journeys in London have increased 47 percent since 2019. Road casualties among cyclists have decreased. Air quality in the areas where cycle lanes replaced traffic lanes has measurably improved. The parking spaces that were removed were predominantly used by cars, not by residents without cars, and the businesses that predicted commercial ruin when parking was removed have, in most documented cases, maintained or increased turnover. The infrastructure is working. The question is whether it could work better — whether junction design, signal timing, and the specific interaction points between pedestrians and cyclists could be addressed more thoughtfully than they currently are — and the answer is clearly yes, and the answer to why they haven’t been is that the budget for the infrastructure is large and the budget for the refinements is small and the political appetite for anything that could be described as ‘slowing down the cycling revolution’ is nonexistent. I am not suggesting slowing it down. I am suggesting that the near-miss at the Islington junction was not inevitable and that better design and enforcement would have prevented it and that both of these things can be true: the cycling revolution is good, and it is not yet finished, and I would like to arrive at work without my heart rate having been raised by anything other than the stairs at Caledonian Road tube station.

London does this to you, eventually. You arrive thinking you will master it — that you will find the affordable flat, the manageable commute, the market that still serves the neighbourhood, the cycle lane that doesn’t nearly kill you, the landmark that hasn’t been sold to someone richer. And what you actually find, after enough time, is that London is not a place you master. It is a place you negotiate — constantly, on its terms, with your own resources, doing your best with what’s available and adjusting when it changes and laughing, when you can, at the gap between what you expected and what you got. I expected a city. I got this city. It is, despite everything and including everything, exactly what I came for. Though I am still looking for the flat.

Three years in North London and I am still surprised by it, which I think is the right pace. If you stop being surprised by London you have either mastered it, which is impossible, or stopped paying attention, which is a waste. The people who have been here for thirty years and claim to have figured it out are the people who have decided which parts to pay attention to and have stopped noticing the rest. I am not there yet. I am still noticing the man asleep standing up, and the cycling near-miss, and the impossible canelé price, and the Battersea turbine hall at dusk when the light comes through the Victorian brick and the scaffolding of a new flat development is visible through the industrial windows and the whole thing is beautiful and strange and specifically London in a way that I couldn’t have understood from Cardiff and that I am still, three years in, only beginning to understand here. This is fine. This is, actually, exactly fine.