The rollercoaster of cycling popularity

[Pat "5mph"]

So it’s a 20 mile drive to pick your own but that’s the price you pay for living rural.

Well, I did say upthread me not running a car (I do have a license) is a lifestyle choice.
I live central, don't apply for jobs that I can't cycle to or reach by public transport.
I live in the Glasgow suburbs: everything is central!
I think the radius of Glasgow is 10/15 miles if you include the suburbs: I'm not even in Glasgow City Council, but the town centre is only 4 miles away.
What I'm saying is, surely the long line of single occupancy cars I pass everyday on the commute is not all rural dwellers?
Should I cycle a couple of miles up the road it's already rural, fields, sheep the lot.
Worry not, though, exit the woods, there's a mega shopping centre right there!
The way it's laid out here, there's a handy Tesco (other supermarkets too!) basically round every corner.

 

[Andy in Germany]

So it’s a 20 mile drive to pick your own but that’s the price you pay for living rural.

Returning home from shopping in Rottenburg. Rural car-free living does require a bit of strategic thinking, and you have to plan ahead somewhat, but it's not automatically a case of "Rural = car".

And again, decent infrastructure makes a massive difference: this is another part of the Neckar Cycleway mentioned above. In the old city of Rottenburg almost all the streets I use are either traffic free, traffic-calmed, and/or built to encourage cycling. After leaving the "city" I don't touch a road until I get to my village.

 

[mjr]

The Netherlands has greater population density than the UK according to google. So has Monaco and that seems to attract a fair few cyclists of a certain ilk.

It depends if you use total density or weighted density. Watch https://video.canadiancivil.com/videos/watch/743cd105-0005-4d45-a724-a66c09a57ea8 for one explanation.

 

[mjr]

But Stevenage: built for bikes, yet no more people cycle because it's still to easy to use cars.

This is not true: Stevenage was built primarily for cars, like nearby Harlow and Milton Keynes. Their mostly-adequate second- and third-class cycleway networks are only enough to bring cycling back up to the national average. Bus travel in MK is pretty terrible, too.

 

[markharry66]

I started cycling again two summers ago, compared to 10 years ago I hardly see anyone on a bike this was not the case 10 years ago. There are more electric numpties flying round at 30 miles plus than there are people cycling into work. I think there maybe an uptake in the summer but this will die a natural death in the winter as the traffic and attitude of the drivers on the road put me off this winter once it was dark cylcing into and going home to work. Half he problem is th attitude of drivers to other road uses until that changes I think things will pretty much stay the same.

 

[Alex321]

I started cycling again two summers ago, compared to 10 years ago I hardly see anyone on a bike this was not the case 10 years ago. There are more electric numpties flying round at 30 miles plus than there are people cycling into work. I think there maybe an uptake in the summer but this will die a natural death in the winter as the traffic and attitude of the drivers on the road put me off this winter once it was dark cylcing into and going home to work. Half he problem is th attitude of drivers to other road uses until that changes I think things will pretty much stay the same.

And that is somethig which is very variable in different parts of the country.

 

[rydabent]

The title of this thread is absolutely correct. Probably the biggest "up" for cycling occurred in the 1973 manufactured gas "shortage". Bike shops sold out, and it continued to vary over the years. And then lately with the advent of E-bikes, a lot more people are starting to ride, that never would have. One of my friends laughed at me for cycling, but a couple years ago he and his wife got E-bikes, and love them.

 

[All uphill]

A couple of weeks ago I cycled 50km locally and saw 8 or 10 other people on bikes. Today I rode the same distance and saw at least ten times as many.

I think that there must be an idea that the bike comes out at Easter and gets put away in the Autumn, so a seasonal pattern. I wonder how people could be encouraged to extend their cycling season; maybe the cycling uniform only lends itself to warmish weather, or maybe the people I saw today are all teachers on hols.

 

[Alex321]

A couple of weeks ago I cycled 50km locally and saw 8 or 10 other people on bikes. Today I rode the same distance and saw at least ten times as many.

I think that there must be an idea that the bike comes out at Easter and gets put away in the Autumn, so a seasonal pattern. I wonder how people could be encouraged to extend their cycling season; maybe the cycling uniform only lends itself to warmish weather, or maybe the people I saw today are all teachers on hols.

Don't knock it.

Better that people just ride in the spring/summer/autumn than that they don't ride at all. Even in this grouop, we have people who don't do winter. Or who only ride on the turbo trainers in the winter.

 

[presta]

I'm not sure how anyone could work that out, given the difference in shape, size and demographics between the UK and NL.

In 2019, the last year before data was skewed by Covid, 67 million people in the UK drove a total of 278 billion miles in cars, an average of 6643km per head. In the same year, the 17 million in the NL drove 104.8 billion km in cars, an average of 6163km per head. So the Dutch drive 93% of the mileage per person that the British do, even though their country is six times smaller than the UK, their public transport is cheaper, and they have one of the best cycling infrastructures in the world. Why?

Clearly the main effect of all the cycling in the NL is to add to the overall amount of travel rather than reducing motor travel. Perhaps we should pursue policies to force people out of their cars directly, and leave them to decide for themselves which alternative they prefer, instead of spending large sums on measures that at best aren’t fixing the problem, and at worst are exacerbating it.

The data is from The Royal Automobile Club, who have a vested interest in making car usage look cheap and convenient.

Most of the motorists I see have a vested interest in complaining that motoring is too expensive, I've never seen them complain that the RAC is biased.

Stevenage was built primarily for cars

It was built with more cycle paths in the 1940s than many towns have in the 2020s, but I said that it made driving too easy.

 

[mjr]

In 2019, the last year before data was skewed by Covid, 67 million people in the UK drove a total of 278 billion miles in cars, an average of 6643km per head. In the same year, the 17 million in the NL drove 104.8 billion km in cars, an average of 6163km per head. So the Dutch drive 93% of the mileage per person that the British do, even though their country is six times smaller than the UK, their public transport is cheaper, and they have one of the best cycling infrastructures in the world. Why?

Because they don't have to stop and deal with security theatre, people control and expensive ferries or motorail at the borders like we do. They can just drive thousands of km away in ways we can't. It's surprising they don't exceed our distances.

Which is ironic with how the people begging for more of those restrictions are mostly the same who claim that any modal filters or tolls on urban driving are equivalent being trapped and ID checked when moving between neighbourhoods! And ignore that you could still cycle freely through them, which we can't at our national border, unlike the Dutch, where sometimes the only clue that you've ridden into Germany is that the bike and horse symbols look a bit different. The rider on the German bike sign might even have a trilby, but that may be an old sign!

 

[classic33]

Because they don't have to stop and deal with security theatre, people control and expensive ferries or motorail at the borders like we do. They can just drive thousands of km away in ways we can't. It's surprising they don't exceed our distances.

Which is ironic with how the people begging for more of those restrictions are mostly the same who claim that any modal filters or tolls on urban driving are equivalent being trapped and ID checked when moving between neighbourhoods! And ignore that you could still cycle freely through them, which we can't at our national border, unlike the Dutch, where sometimes the only clue that you've ridden into Germany is that the bike and horse symbols look a bit different. The rider on the German bike sign might even have a trilby, but that may be an old sign!

Kinda hard to do when we live on an island and the national border is the shoreline.

As for driving thousands of kilometres, we're living on an island where one of the longest driving distances, between start and finish points, is less than a 1,000 miles it's going to be hard achieve. The only land boundary we share with another country we have is on a smaller island, Ireland.

 

[Alex321]

In 2019, the last year before data was skewed by Covid, 67 million people in the UK drove a total of 278 billion miles in cars, an average of 6643km per head. In the same year, the 17 million in the NL drove 104.8 billion km in cars, an average of 6163km per head. So the Dutch drive 93% of the mileage per person that the British do, even though their country is six times smaller than the UK, their public transport is cheaper, and they have one of the best cycling infrastructures in the world. Why?

Their country is effectively the whole of the Schengen area, which is much bigger than the UK.

But even before Schengen, the Dutch would regularly drive all over Europe for holidays to places we would fly.

 

[Andy in Germany]

Because they don't have to stop and deal with security theatre, people control and expensive ferries or motorail at the borders like we do. They can just drive thousands of km away in ways we can't. It's surprising they don't exceed our distances.

That makes more sense. Given hat a lot of the journeys in the NL are for things like school or work, I had visions of people riding to work, working all day, riding home, then getting in their car and driving around until they travelled the same distance in a car every day, before going home.

 

[Andy in Germany]

Most of the motorists I see have a vested interest in complaining that motoring is too expensive, I've never seen them complain that the RAC is biased.

The RAC will say whatever they think benefits their members or supports their interests, with whatever audience they are trying to convince. To be fair, this is their job.

If they think they need to present driving as the cheap transport option for the masses, they will, but I've no doubt at the same time, if they want to campaign for a reduction in road tax they'll be presenting data to the UKgov that "proves" that motorists are unfairly shouldering the burden of all transport in the UK.