OPINION
LAURA LAKER: INDICATOR SPECIES I
Laura reflects on cycle safety, and the rise and fall in the number of people cycling.
ndicator species. Canary in the coalmine. Whatever you want to call them, women and children are the
people who tell us how we’re doing on our journey to becoming a cycling nation. The most recent National Travel
Survey, then, is telling us something. After a pandemic boom, England is now back to pre-COVID levels of cycling. Women and children, the NTS found, are cycling less than men. On average, people made 15 cycling trips in the year to June 2024 – down from 16 in 2023. Broken down by gender, women made, on average, fewer than half the cycling trips per year, just nine, versus 20 for men. The gender gap is even more stark among children: girls aged 16 and younger took six cycling trips by bike a year, compared with 20 for boys, less than a third.
The reasons why aren’t hard to fathom. If our roads aren’t safe, or if cycle routes are circuitous and inconvenient, we know women and girls in particular are unlikely to cycle on them. Parents are unlikely to let their kids dice with traffic to get to school or play, and the faster, heavier and more dangerous that traffic is, the fewer of them we’ll see on bikes. There is, however, rather more to it than simply ‘build it and they will come’. Over recent years, the pandemic glow-up
cycling received – the recognition of the power of the bicycle, and all of its two, three and four-wheeled cousins in taking us places and keeping us healthy – has faded as the traffic returned. The sight of families and people from more diverse backgrounds, of women and kids on bikes, has faded with it. It’s telling this phenomenon doesn’t apply
to all people all of the time. Those who cycle despite the conditions, people like me
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and possibly you, the confident ones, kept cycling. In fact, the NTS found these people did more miles than before. This trend is not new: people took up cycling inspired by Team GB’s 2012 Olympic cycling successes, only to have a scary near miss and decide it wasn’t worth the risk. Bikes went back into sheds, and people forgot about them. The ones who weren’t put off – who aren’t deterred by bad experiences – are outliers, and the lie that more of us can cycle under current conditions, with enough training, enough confidence, is a fallacy. If that were true, we’d already be a lot closer to the Netherlands, a country where 27% of all trips are
cycled, rather than the stubborn 2%. This downturn in cycling, happily, doesn’t apply to all of the country: in London in 2024, there were 1.33 million cycling trips a day – up 5% on 2023 and a colossal 26% on 2019. Cycling now accounts for a third of the tube network in people-carrying capacity. In Greater Manchester,
‘AFTER A PANDEMIC BOOM, ENGLAND IS NOW BACK TO PRE- COVID LEVELS OF CYCLING. WOMEN AND CHILDREN, THE NTS FOUND, ARE CYCLING LESS THAN MEN.’
cycling increased a stonking 21% between 2022 and 2023. What do these places have in common? They built safe routes for people to cycle. London’s network quadrupled between 2016 and 2023/24 – a whopping achievement with some world- class protected routes, although some of that 403km network is little more than some signage. In Greater Manchester, there are now 117km of separate cycling routes, 28 protected junctions and 24 school streets, with more on the way. Where safe routes are built, the number of women and children cycling increases as a proportion of the population. But even in our best cities, we are nowhere near gender parity. In England’s relative cycling utopia
june 2025 | 15
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