Cycling is "booming" in the UK ?

Cycling as a mode of transport in the UK is consistently doing slightly worse than "other" and that's been consistently true for a very long time.

For as long as I can remember, cyclists and government alike in the UK have claimed that cycling is on the up. The expression often used is to say that it is "booming". However, this is wishful thinking. The chart above shows the number of trips per person per year by different modes in the UK from the mid 1990s to (nearly) the present day. The data which is comes from is in this table:

Bicycle trips per year per person in the UK: 18,17,16,15,16,14,16,14,16. There's no upward trend there, just statistical noise.

I blogged about this same table a few weeks back because spurious claims were being made that cycling was getting safer in Britain because of a rise in the cycling rate. Based on the information you see here, some people have claimed that there was a "17% increase" between 2007 and 2008. However, this is a mis-reading of the statistics. There will always be some noise, and this figure for cycling has been bouncing around between 14 and 17 for the last ten years.

If cycling is really to "boom" in Britain it's very obvious what needs to happen. It's also obvious what needs to happen with campaigning. Campaigners must stop being exciting about tiny changes in numbers from one year to the next and stop forgetting that small increases are easily wiped out by small decreases either in different years or in different places. Look closely at any figures like this and there will always be some up and down movement. This creeps into all and any collection of figures. Small changes year on year become apparent even if there isn't a real change. This is especially true when you're looking at small sample sizes and very small figures, such as the 1.6% cycling rate of the UK (and the even lower rates in some other English speaking countries). There is only a real trend when the same thing is seen for many years, and the differences seen are outside the bounds of error.

For a real "boom" in cycling, instead of an imaginary one, it's also quite obvious what is required of the infrastructure. Let's see no more of the junk infrastructure that cyclists have been fobbed off with already. Cyclists in the UK need the subjective safety and convenient conditions experienced by Dutch cyclists, along with vast amounts of cycle parking, bridges, underpasses and traffic lights designed to benefit cyclists, unravelling of cycling routes from driving routes as well as a decent standard of maintenance for cyclists, and all the other things which are taken for granted over here.

Only once a real effort is put into making the conditions right for cycling will people take it seriously as a mode of transport, and only then will the figures head upwards year on year.

And yes, it is possible in Britain. Many people still alive were themselves cyclists before the steep post WWII decline in cycling got underway in Britain. In 1949, not only was cycling a major form of transport in Britain, but at that time, British people covered more distance by bicycle than by car and taxi combined.

Read more posts about campaigning.

Update 2012

Two years later, Joe Dunkley produced the graph on the right as part of an excellent summary of each date since the 1970s when a British minister told the public that cycling was "booming".

Update July 2012
Joe's done more work and discovered that London's recent "boom" may well be in part due to their having redefined what a cyclist is. For a real "boom", actual progress in infrastructure is needed, not just a public relations exercise based on cooking the books.

Update June 2023
More than ten years have passed and there is still no progress (source). The British government gave £2.3B to councils to fund new active travel infrastructure between 2016 and 2022, but do so "without knowing which schemes were good enough". As a result, the four goals set in 2017 for 2030 and 2035 will probably be missed. Only one minor goal, encouraging people to walk a bit more by 2025, could possibly be met. The cycling goal has definitely been missed with levels of activity lower now than when the government’s first cycling and walking investment strategy for England was published in 2017.

Update August 2024
New statistics from the UK government show that cycling is still stagnated in the UK. There were 15 bicycle trips per person per year in 2023, which is no change at all from 20 years ago. It brings me no pleasure to report this.

I'm now approaching my 60s and still feel fairly fit. I still cycle every day, averaging somewhat more than a hundred km a week and I still can cycle over 200 km in a single day without any issues. So it also brings me no pleasure to read in the report from the UK that "Older age groups of those 60 and over are more likely to say that they have a health condition which prevents them from cycling, or cycling more, or that cycling is not for people like them."

Is cycling getting safer in Britain ?

Recent reports have pointed out that there is a welcome downward trend in cyclist deaths in the UK. The numbers come from Office of National Statistics report. However, some reporters have gone further, and claimed that this is evidence of a "safety in numbers" effect, in that fewer injuries are occurring because the number of cycle journeys made in the UK is growing.

Unfortunately, that conclusion is without any evidence to support it. For as long as I can remember, cycling organisations in the UK have made regular claims that cycling is booming. It may be more palatable news than reporting a decline, but actually there has been a downward trend since the 1950s, and cycling currently bumps along at probably the lowest figure it can reach. Currently about 1.6% of journeys in the UK are by bike - about the number you get anywhere where cycling is under stress. It will never be 0% because there are always bicycle fanatics¹ who will cycle whatever the conditions, and always a few people for whom cycling is the only viable option due to its low cost.

So what is 1.6% ? Well, as you see above, the average British person makes 16 journeys per year by bike. That's as many as the average resident of Groningen makes in 11 days. Of course these journeys are not spread evenly through the population. The fanatics cycle much more than that, and to make up for it, 70 % of the British population doesn't cycle at all. Not even once per year.

Note that the article referred to above, and the ONS document, both claim there has been a "17% increase on the previous year" in cycle journeys based merely on looking at the numbers for 2007 and 2008. However, the number of cycle journeys per year are reported as being between 14 and 16 for every year between 2002 and the present. This is just statistical noise, not a trend.

I suspect that there are two reasons for the apparent improvement in safety of cyclists in the UK. One reason is that the demographics have become yet more narrow, leaving just the fanatics, who tend to be experienced, cycling.

Fewer British children are cycling, and children have never been the safest of road users (indeed, the UK's record on road safety for children is one of the worst in Europe).

Perhaps this second set of numbers from the same document better explains the increased apparent safety of cyclists in the UK. While no figures are given for children cycling to school (it's been very low for many years, and the document notes that "Other" generally means a local bus), fewer children than ever now walk to school. Indeed, the most common way for primary school children to get to school in the UK now is by car.

Reading the document you find such passages as "The majority of children aged 7 to 10 were usually accompanied to school by an adult in 2008 (86 per cent), an increase from 78 per cent in 2002." and that the main reason for accompanying children was "traffic danger (58 per cent)."

It seems reasonable to assume that a similar change has occurred in child cycling.

Others have noted that teenage girls hardly cycle at all in the UK. Other groups who feel less than confident on Britain's subjectively unsafe roads are also less likely to cycle now than in the past, or in countries such as the Netherlands where children have a remarkable degree of independence through cycling and virtually everyone cycles.

Context. How are cyclists doing relative to other road users ?
We must also put the improvement in safety for Britain's cyclists in the context of an overall improvement in road safety in the UK.

Britain's roads have become safer for all modes of transport, and actually cycling's improvement is smaller as a proportion (roughly 40% of the risk there used to be) than most other modes (driving now has 30% of the risk it used to have).

Compared with driving, cycling now has a risk 12.7 times as large per km travelled, when it was just 9.3 times as risky in 1981. So, to answer the question posed at the top, cycling in Britain is now safer overall than it used to be, but it's less safe than it used to be relative to driving.


We touched on school travel above, and I think it's interesting to compare the high profile that Britain has achieved internationally based on claims to have achieved changes in school travel ("The UK is a world-leader in terms of School Travel Plan (STP) development and implementation") with the reality of how walking to school has declined in the country. The comparison with the Dutch situation is stark. Words from government aren't enough. What is needed is the infrastructure which makes people feel safe when walking or cycling, which makes it an attractive and convenient thing to do.

Streets in these two countries look completely different and that's why people's behaviour is different.

I've pointed out before that Britain's overall record on road safety may be good, but it's not been achieved in the same way as the Dutch have achieved their even better record.

You can read more on the effect of British policy on children.

2013 update
The British government reports that "The number of pedal cyclists killed rose by 10 per cent from 107 in 2011 to 118 in 2012. In addition, the number of pedal cyclists reported to the police as seriously injured in a road accident increased by 4 per cent to 3,222. There is a well-established upward trend in pedal cyclist casualties; this is eighth year that the number of seriously injured cyclist casualties has increased." (thanks to GB Cycling Embassy)

True improvements in cycling safety in the UK will result from building a proper network for cyclists, not through wishful thinking about safety in numbers.

2015 update

The inevitable result of  slightly more people cycling with the same dangerous conditions is a rise in cyclist injuries (the blue line). Courtesy of Sam Saunders and the UK Department for Transport.

Britain's roads continue to get safer for motorists as road and car design improve the safety of those who use motor vehicles. We should not be surprised that the small rise in cycling in recent years has led to more cyclists being killed and injured because cycling infrastructure has not improved in the UK.

Dutch road safety improvements were due to sustainable
safety, not wishful thinking about safety in numbers.

This is as we should expect. There is no "safety in numbers" effect. It has never existed. Cycling is safest where the cycling infrastructure removes danger and safer cycling conditions lead to more cycling. That is why the Netherlands still leads the world in cyclist safety.

¹Don't be offended. I number myself amongst the fanatics.