Cheers
. The cycling bit starts at about 17 mins.
Let's hope that, together with the Chris Boradman interviews the other day, this is the beginnings of sustained BBC support for increasing cycling (though I'm not waiting up).
Two comments on the programme:
On the different populations in different European cities making comparison difficult, absolute numbers of road users aren't as important as road user density (road users per square meter). London wouldn't be that different from Amsterdam and Copenhagen in that respect IF, and it's a big if, cycling modal share were similar. As it is, private cars are choking London's traffic flow.
There seemed to be an assumption among some of the interviewees that extra cyclists necessarily means that the extra road users are somehow magicked out of thin air - but won't part of the new uptake of cyclists come from other road users - even, amazingly enough, some motorists? Drawingrings 11th Sept blog entry shows a graph where the decline in car use in London is correlated nicely with increase in bicycle and bus use in the last few years (
http://drawingrings.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/more-cycling-than-car-traffic-in.html). This suggests that motorists do indeed switch. So isn't it the case that the more you can get on bicycles (or buses) the more space and time (and the less stress) everyone will have? You'd be stupid not to encourage this …er, hang on… as the presenters said - UK cites are decades behind their European counterparts.
