Cycling nearly doubles during strikes

The only option for some

London’s tube and public transport strikes that ran from 5 to 12 September had a rather unexpected side effect in significantly boosting cycling numbers through the week and beyond.

Huge numbers of Londoners, faced with nearly all underground lines shut down for multiple days, chose to cycle during the strike week.

This could be because this was the first major tube/TfL strike since Mayor of London Sadiq Khan made good on pledges to London Cycling Campaign and London to massively expand the cycle network of safe routes and since the advent of dockless hire as a mass mode of transport across large areas of London.

Faced with a choice of heavily congested roads at gridlock, buses often stuck in the same traffic and many at or over capacity, cycling rapidly became the default choice for those who had to go in for work, given few viable alternatives.

The number of people cycling was startling. Perhaps less startling for those of us who already cycle in London and enjoy its freedom, is how many came out of the week wanting to keep pedalling.

A boom in every type of cycling

Dockless hire bike operator Lime reported that hire rates went up 50 percent on the first two days of the strike, rising to 70 percent up by Thursday at the end.

A YouGov survey of Londoners found 21 percent had cycled during the strike, and 28 percent were more likely to cycle following it.

Even on Monday, at the start of the strike, Will Norman suggested two million journeys daily were made by cycling in London – a huge leap from the usual average of 1.33 million of circa 50 percent additional cycling.

Tom Fyans, CEO The London Cycling Campaign, told The Standard: “The mass shift to dockless hire bikes during the strikes demonstrated the power of cycling to move people around our city safely, the incredible convenience of dockless hire, the huge untapped potential as a safe, healthy transport mode that remains unfulfilled for cycling in London – with too many areas still deprived of truly safe, comfortable cycle routes, and the desperate need for more cycle capacity our routes already face.

“For more of those 1 in 4 Londoners who want to cycle more to keep pedalling, we’ll need a lot more cycle tracks, crossings, and routes.”

Local WhatsApp and NextDoor groups exploded with messages from those either digging their unused bikes out of sheds or looking to hire dockless bikes from their start and worried about how to use them, or in many outer London cases, from those wondering if bikes would be available at mainline stations if they took the overground in part way.

And by Tuesday it was clear that not only was cycling basically the dominant mode of transport suddenly in inner London, and that huge numbers had successfully transitioned to cycling but that that had had two further impacts.

The wobbly ones!

The advent of new to cycling (again) ‘strikelists’ for the week of the strikes, highlighted two very clear patterns emerging…

Firstly, the media and many cyclists commented on how… rusty… some cycling behaviour during the strike was. The London Ambulance Service told The Times late on the week that collisions and injuries were way up as a result of such wobbly new cyclists everywhere, with many of them on heavy dockless hire ebikes.

Except… collisions as a rate compared to overall journeys were actually way down – and the raw numbers tell a fantastic story. With millions of cycling journeys daily happening, the London Ambulance Service reported a Monday to Wednesday rise of 28 percent – a percentage rise dwarfed by the rise on those days of cycling journeys, but also in raw numbers a rise from 28 incidents involving cycling that the London Ambulance Service attended, to 36. Again, in the context of millions of cycle journeys daily.

The Standard reported The Times as saying collisions involving cycling were up 44 percent by the end of the week. But cycling overall numbers in London appeared to be up well above 50 percent for the week, so overall risk was likely significantly reduced. And extrapolating from earlier in the week, that’d still mean only circa 65 collisions for the whole week, again to a backdrop of potentially 7-10 million cycled journeys, and the vast bulk of which would have been ‘slight’ collisions (in 2024 these amounted to 80 percent of cycle collisions in London).

Watch any YouTube video of Dutch ‘all green’ or ‘scramble’ junctions and you’ll see what looks like absolute chaos – frequently to British eyes, full of near misses and eye-watering moments. But the chaos is actually calm negotiation on a machine designed to be highly nimble. And the same appears to have proven true of London – despite legions of people with only a shaky awareness of good cycling behaviour let loose on cycle tracks, crossings and parks, many returning to cycling after decades of absence, many seemingly giddy with the power of sheer numbers just blatantly ignoring the wellbeing of others and traffic lights aplenty, the statistical reality appears to be that the sheer numbers ended up being overall less risky.

In other words, Londoners cycling, walking, wheeling were actually a bit safer during strike week, despite appearances to the contrary. Obviously LCC doesn’t condone risky cycling behaviour – we actively seek to reduce it. But during the strikes, what looked and felt sometimes like chaos thankfully didn’t result in a greater rate of collisions – likely as everyone was forced into slowing down.

We’re going to need a bigger cycle track!

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, the strikes saw the kind of numbers of people cycling that the Mayor and TfL essentially are aiming for arriving in 20 years time in order to fulfil the Mayor’s Transport Strategy, replacing loads of car journeys to save the climate and our public health.

And those numbers highlighted multiple infrastructure issues London continues to face regarding cycling.

We have huge gaps where safe cycle routes are much needed but simply haven’t been delivered. Mostly, that’s due to boroughs where cycling is viewed politically as something at best to actively ignore.

Video footage of Kensington High Street showed the numbers of people cycling simply forcing drivers to a standstill – due to a total lack of cycle tracks (removed after just a few weeks after temporary ones went in during the pandemic, and without any real consultation). Similar footage from other boroughs was also widely available on platforms like TikTok.

Simon Munk, our Head of Campaigns & Community Development told the Metro: “It’s great that lots of people are cycling, and as a charity our remit is to get more people to cycle, but it exposes the lack of capacity for cycling in London.

“We have got some really good cycling routes in London, but they are still way too many gaps. The routes that we do have were over capacity even before the strikes. If you cycle on the Embankment on an average day there are queues and cyclists overtaking each other because it is too overcrowded. London has a long way to go for the level of cycle infrastructure it needs.”

We simply will not get more people cycling and a wider range of people cycling without a truly coherent network of safe cycle routes.

Where that network is becoming more visible each year – in central and east London mostly – then more diverse cycling is visible and was starkly visible during the strikes.

But where there are huge gaps, the strikes saw Londoners struggle in despite conditions – but they won’t keep riding in from Brent or Harrow or Tower Hamlets without more actual on the ground safe routes.

The difference between the cycle route haves and have nots has perhaps never been more stark.

More, nearly every single safe cycle route and piece of infrastructure we have went way over capacity during the strikes.

If this was what London will look like when we hit two million cycle journeys daily (we’re already at 1.33 million or above), then we’re going to need a lot wider cycle tracks and more of them, as well as more Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), junctions, cycle parking etc.

Cycleway C3 on the Embankment and C6 over Blackfriars Bridge were already significantly over capacity before the strikes hit. As a result we saw huge queues for lights and at pinch points during the strikes.

The answer is not only to widen them significantly – taking more roadspace from motor vehicles (which needs to happen anyway, given the Mayor’s targets to reduce road km driven by 27% by 2030 for climate and also to meet his Transport Strategy targets on mode share, collisions etc.). The answer is also to provide more routes in parallel nearby.

Every crossing of the Thames in London should at this point be a viable cycle route and lead to further north-south routes and the Embankment east-west needs an urgent second, third, fourth route parallel in the City, Southwark etc. that’s just as good and direct.

That is, of course, what the Dutch have done. That’s what Paris is busy doing right now. And it’s what the strikes demonstrated so clearly, what will need to happen in London next. Because that’s what will mean kids, women, the elderly, Disabled People can cycle not just the faster, fitter and more fearless among us

Obviously that’s what LCC will continue to campaign for across London. The strikes, in cycling terms, were a glimpse of the future – and what we need to do to get there.