How to design a city?

One thing about London which I think limits its potential as a cycling city is that it is at once too big and too small. It is a city of villages, so if your need can be met locally it is probably within walking distance, and taking the bike is a hassle. If it cannot it is likely bloody miles away, and the bus, tube, motorcycle or car seems like a more practical idea than a bicycle - especially if you figure 'well I'm making the trip anyway so I shall stock up on lots of things while I am there' and then need to carry a load of stuff all the way back home.

Very true, a very good description of the somewhat paradoxical choices facing the travelling public in London.

We cycling enthusiasts are a bit weird and don't think anything of riding 15 miles (well not me, I draw the line at 7)

Well, it really depends what the trip is for--I don't think anything of riding 15 or 7 miles, but what am I going to achieve by this trip? For leisure, my limit is however much work I need to do and have time for , which can be anything from 20 miles to 100. For everyday trips, I would set my ideal commuting distance at about five miles. To get something I desperately needed, I'd go further. And how often would I make trips of certain lengths? Many people can do 100 miles once in a year, far fewer can do it many times.

but for the widespread use of bikes as a primary transport by non-sporty people you kind of need everything to be no more than 3-4 miles away.

Exactly. Or most things. And the non-sporty people would of course gradually get more sporty. :)

And in particular, your place of work needs to be that close to your home. That's rare in London. In short the populace will always choose the most convenient form of transport for the task in hand, and cost cannot be a significant factor or nobody would ever use the tube or train. Running a car is far cheaper, yet most Londoners don't do it, because it's less convenient.

I don't think you will remove people from cars by making driving any more inconvenient or expensive. It's already really bloody inconvenient, expensive and stressful.

I've never driven, but I think I agree, although quite often I meet people who drive who insist that they greatly enjoy it.

The congestion charge did show that you can make driving less popular by showing up more of its real cost, but it is currently of course a bit of a lame duck as the charge hasn't kept pace with economic factors influencing people's readiness to pay it.

Driving in London is a hateful business, so it can be assumed that the vast majority of drivers don't do it through choice. If you took away the minicabs, chauffeur services, police, commercial vehicles, taxis, buses, ambulances and so forth from the roads in central London I'd bet that there would be hardly any traffic left.

I think what would happen in the first place would be that you'd get more commercial motor traffic turning up that is currently suppressed because the cost doesn't make it worth it. And by some estimates, roughly 50% of trips in London are under two miles, without passengers, not undertaken by a person with mobility difficulties, and without carrying loads that would require a car. I don't have the latest figures on this, and of course this is only an estimate, so it would be interesting to find more research on this. At any rate, anecdotally the percentage of private motor traffic is still high, I think. That's how it seems to me when I'm riding around, anyway, but the impression may of course be misleading.

The war on the private motorist, if there ever was one, has been won.

The 'war' is of course a tabloid invention--the Government still subsidises private motor traffic to the tune of billions and billions. But this emotional reaction contains the important point that creating more disincentives to driving to redress the imbalance it causes is of course predominantly felt to be negative.

The approach instead has to be promoting cycling and walking by taking all those back streets and rat runs that were made one-way, single ended, traffic calmed, and otherwise ruined and turn them into shared space pedestrian and cyclist streets (with retractable bollards at the ends for emergency vehicles), providing cyclists with a car-free fast efficient network of high quality roads, whilst taking little or nothing away from the existing trunk routes. Indeed these could then be improved by removing the crappy little cycle lanes, to give a carrot to the drivers, (but also improve cycle safety given that they encourage nearsiding and nearly all cyclist deaths in London last year were caused by nearsiding trucks).

+1. Permeability FTW. Long-standing policy by the London Cycling Campaign in Hackney. Have a look here:

http://www.hackney-cyclists.org.uk/permproj.htm
http://www.hackney-cyclists.org.uk/permeability.htm

We want higher-order solutions than cycle lanes and fortunately we've managed to keep those to a minimum in Hackney.

Of course there the whole motorcycle option which is always ignored in these discussions. If motorcycles could be treated with bicycles as the solution, rather than lumped with cars as part of the problem I think more progress could be made. Once more bike is one less car, engine or not.

The reason why the motorcycle option is not treated as seriously is of course because motorcycles share some of the same problems that cars create, while the comparison with pedal cycles isn't as straightforward as it may first appear. But I know we've talked about this before so I'll leave it.