irishboyinlondon

Spotting a man on a bike with a dog in the front basket and a child in the back trailer seems an unlikely occurrence in London. So too a chap pulling a suitcase along beside his two wheels, or a child travelling the city by standing on the back rack of her mother’s bicycle.

Of course, I saw none of these people spinning their way through our capital but in Amsterdam — a city just an hour’s easyJet flight away from London yet worlds apart when it comes to cycling.

This Saturday, the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) is holding its Big Ride — a cycle ride through central London supporting its “Love London, Go Dutch” campaign. It calls on the mayoral candidates to bring Amsterdam-style safer cycling streets to London.

Londoners are often incredulous when the idea is raised of dedicated cycle lanes along all main roads — commonly stating that our road layouts are too old and streets too narrow.

Yet Amsterdam, with many equally narrow streets, did not begin its development as a cycling city until the Seventies, before which the UK’s and the Netherlands’s cycling profile looked similar. Today, when around just three  per cent of journeys in London are made by bike, that figure is 47 per cent in Amsterdam — 14 per cent more than in 1991. So I went to Amsterdam to see whether we could head in the same direction as its cyclists…

…Funding is always the biggest issue. The Amsterdam Cycling Strategy 2007-2010 committed nearly 70 million to cycling over four years.

“The past couple of years the budget has been lower, because of the economic situation and since some of the larger and expensive projects have been completed,” explains de Lange.

Money comes from several funds including an air quality plan, national subsidies for infrastructure and from individual boroughs, but the largest proportion (more than 35 million) comes from the Amsterdam Mobility Fund. De Lange explains that this pot of money, to fund public transport and cycling, is generated from car parking charges. So although parking in Amsterdam costs around 4 an hour in some places, drivers can see that their money is going to improving other forms of transportation.

The London Cycling Campaign works out that whereas in Amsterdam £20 per head is spent on cycling, in London Boris Johnson’s 13 “biking boroughs” — part of his “cycling revolution” — provides just 75p-95p per head in those areas.

But it does not expect large sums of money upfront and an immediate overhaul of London roads. Rather it sees cycling infrastructure being built into new road and junction developments over time.

“We estimate that including proper provision for cycling at Blackfriars Bridge would have added only one or two per cent to the total cost of the rail/road interchange project,” it says.

In Amsterdam, de Lange explains:  “Most often new bicycle paths are made when a street has to be renovated anyway. This is about every 25 years. Then it is not a lot more expensive to make a bicycle path than to make a pavement or parking places.”