| Comment | The pandemic helped illustrate that there is an underlying demand from people to be able to cycle more.
Not everyone. People always jump on this and say "but I don't want to" or "not everyone wants to". Yes, deifnitely true. No one's pretending 100%, or even 50%, or even 30% of people want to cycle everywhere all the time. But the point is there's a latent level of demand that isn't being supported. It might be something closer to 15-20% of journeys, but that would be fine.
As I say, if you're looking for as clear an illustration as possible of why infrastructure and traffic calming is much much more important than weather, look at the period of the pandemic.
Did the weather change for 2 years? No. But cycling rates more than doubled.
What changed was there were fewer cars on our roads, and people were able to cycle around confidently like they hadn't before.
Separate bike infrastructure replicates this effect, by giving people a safe space to ride on. |
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