David Tarsh is a long-standing commentator/consultant on the airline industry, and also a cyclist. He is very much in favour of encouraging people to cycle but NOT building new bike lanes. 
"Please don’t be fooled by what the politicians are telling you about their plans for new cycle lanes. Demand to see hard evidence. They are well-meaning but their dogma is flawed.
Winston Churchill said never waste a good crisis. The reason – a crisis is a moment to make a bad or unpopular decision and get away with it on spurious grounds. This will happen if the government uses the Covid-19 crisis to encourage the construction of new segregated cycle lanes.
Today’s appeal to people to walk or cycle to work is admirable but any encouragement of the building of cycle lanes is highly questionable for the following reasons:
· They are not needed – the roads are currently empty and the pavements too. For example, one of the roads proposed for a new bike track is Park Lane. During lockdown, I have cycled up and down Park Lane on numerous occasions and in all that time I have only once seen another cyclist!
· There is insufficient demand – cyclists make up fewer than 3% of road users, excluding pedestrians. Even if cycling were to grow by 100%, a tiny fraction of road users would still be cyclists. However, in London, the number of Santander bike hires is falling dramatically. Don’t take my word for it; look at TfL’s own data: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/number-bicycle-hires.
· Segregated cycle lanes are a bad and inequitable allocation of road space – because they give over 25% of precious road space to a tiny proportion of road users who use that space for less than 20% of the day and for 80% of the day that space is empty and unavailable to all other road users. That is not fair to other road users and it is not an efficient use of road space.
· Cycling on cycle tracks is NOT safer – here is data.
· They are an unnecessary waste of money – by definition, building something that is not needed wastes taxpayers’ hard-earned money.
· When the traffic comes back they will create unnecessary gridlock – there is clear evidence of this by studying places like Blackfriars Bridge, where you see queuing traffic for most of the day and no cycle traffic for even more of the day.
· The argument that people will cycle if cycle lanes are provided is proven to be wrong – take a look at Stevenage, a town designed for cycle usage; it’s full of bike lanes just like Ghent but cycling uptake is just 3%. If that argument were right, Stevenage would be overwhelmed by cycle traffic, which it isn’t.
If you have the opportunity to quiz transport ministers and others on plans for bike lanes, please ask the following questions:
· What study have you done on the demand for cycling as a proportion of road traffic and what does it show?
· What work have you done on the business case for cycle lanes and what does it show?
· What modelling have you done on overall traffic speeds and what does it show?
· What will be the impact on congestion when the traffic returns?
One place where a new segregated cycle track, known as CS9, has been proposed is Hammersmith Road but Transport for London’s own study forecast that the traffic will be reduced to just 3.75mph and there will be no benefit to air quality. How can it make sense to create such congestion? (NB: the TfL study was produced before expansion of Olympia was approved so its already-dire predictions are too optimistic!) What’s worse, residents living in the postcodes along this route were 60:40 opposed to it being built and they signed a petition against it.
TfL often cite the Embankment as a cycle route success. The question there should be: What has the construction of the cycle track done to the overall throughput of people along that route across the whole day? The answer according to the model I built, using TfL data, shows it to have been cut down by a third. So overall that cycle track has been highly congesting since it was the primary East-West route across the centre of London.
I can provide hard evidence for all the points made above but below are a few useful links to make it clear that what I am saying is fully justified".
The editor-in-chief would like to make it clear that he supports the above but would like to see the compulsory wearing of (legal) helmets be brought in under the Road Traffic Acts, a licence fee paid to support the use of the highway, and insurance made compulsory.
www.tarsh.com
Some useful reports:
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/number-bicycle-hires
www.onlondon.co.uk/dave-hill-london-cycling-policy-is-not-meeting-its-goals
https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/stevenage
www.landscapearchitecture.org.uk/66-7-cyclist-fatalities-2018-tfls-lcn-london-cycle-network
