Cycling in the UK has benefited from success at the Olympics post-2008, the staging of the Tour de France in 2014 and subsequent annual Tour de Yorkshire.
Not in the long term it didn't, sadly. Just a few months ago, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson berated successive governments about overemphasis on elite sport and not broadening it to mass walking and cycling:
"My own passion for watching the Games is no secret, but I also recognise that it’s not for everybody, and even for those people it does inspire to be active, the effect can be short-lived. Far too often the debate on elite sport, inspiration, and population changes in activity have been conflated. This conflation is to the detriment of everyone and means our sector has fallen short of playing its fullest role in society. Because it has created false hopes on matters such as “legacy” from major sporting moments. It has also deflected important focus away from the parts of our sector that are the lead drivers of activity on a mass scale – with fitness and leisure being one of them, alongside walking, cycling, and running." (
full speech)
The levels of cycling, number of trips, distance and % of people cycling, had remained stubbornly pretty steady during the 2010s. The covid crisis saw cycling levels surge (for example, a 75% increase in leisure cycling trips overwhelming a 20% decline in utility trips), but also a surge in inactivity (an increase of sitting still by 2 hours/day).
Parts of the UK are pretty good for cycling, with London and some university cities leading the way, but we're a long way behind all our neighbours plus Denmark. We still don't even have standard designs that highways departments really have to stick to, so you can never be sure if a blue bike lane sign is going to lead you to heaven (gliding effortlessly into town on a straight flat smooth road with priority or bridges across motorists to a large cycle parking area or a key junction) or hell (an agility test of tight turns and long waits, conflicting with walkers and bumping over kerbs and cobbles), even within one city.
While it's probably still the least bike-friendly of neighbouring countries, France in particular seems to have moved on in leaps and bounds the last few years, although it's very uneven and variable by region, but I don't think any region of the UK has matched any of France (and why would it, with England's regional government being abolished, and the "metro mayors" replacing it in some parts of the country being more interested in glitzy gadgetbahns like self-driving electric buses in tunnels). Maybe London has kept pace with average France, but Paris is making bigger changes.
If I was looking for most avid country, it's probably Belgium for the mix of sporting and utility. The infrastructure isn't as good as the Netherlands, maybe almost on a level with Denmark, especially in the south/east, but it's improving and spreading and it remains the only country where I've had the police stopping the traffic for us on a big €20 tourist office ride. Even without police, drivers often slowed/stopped without being required if there was any chance we might want to cross their path. That's a level of care which I've not noticed in the Netherlands, which is probably just as well because Belgium's worse infrastructure does put you in conflict with motorists much more often. I'm not sure how this came about, because 20-30 years ago, it was said that Belgian drivers preferred to crash than give way if not compelled and the number of dented cars backed it up.
