The London Cycling Campaign has urged the capital’s mayoral candidates to stop trying to make Londoners “fearful” of cycling and to avoid dragging people who ride bikes into “phoney culture wars” – just a few weeks after Conservative hopeful Susan Hall claimed “virtue signalling” cycle lanes were causing “havoc” and gridlock for motorists.
Launching its ‘London loves cycling’ campaign, which aims to encourage cyclists to celebrate the joys of travelling across the city by bike, ahead of the mayoral elections on 2 May, the London Cycling Campaign has claimed that cycling in the capital was now “mainstream”, with 1.26m weekday journeys now being cycled.
The group has also pointed out that this new mainstream status was aided by progressive cycling measures introduced by both Conservative mayor Boris Johnson and the current Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan, and that any attempts to end this “decade of progress” would be “unpopular and futile”.
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“Cycling is an everyday way of getting about London for so many people now,” LCC’s chief executive Tom Fyans said as he launched the new campaign, which will include a cycling ‘festival’ during the weekend before the May elections.
“So it’d be a short-sighted politician indeed to scrap schemes that have resulted in huge growth in this clean, heathy, and congestion-busting way to travel.
“We’re asking London’s mayoral candidates to help unlock the capital’s potential by making it truly safe, funding it appropriately, and rolling out more high-quality cycle routes, rather than try to make Londoners fearful of a simply joyous, healthy mode of transport.
“The blunt fearmongering is a bit like asking Londoners to fear ice cream, a night out or birdsong – and about as likely to work as that.”
Fyans’ reference to “blunt fearmongering” could be viewed as a thinly veiled swipe at the Conservative Party’s candidate Hall, who launched her campaign at the end of March by once again setting out her stall as the prospective mayor most likely to end the so-called “war on the motorist”.
Hall – whose 26-point deficit to Khan means she would require an unlikely turn of events to land the top job in the capital – said last month that she is “pro any form of transport” but questioned why “damn ridiculous” cycle lanes had been built when “we must remember there’s only two to three per cent of the population that are cyclists”.
“We must look at some of these cycle lanes that have been put in,” she said. “I’ll give you the example of Park Lane. It’s damn ridiculous, quite frankly.
“It was virtue signalling by this mayor [Sadiq Khan] because there’s a cycle lane that goes through the park right next door. The traffic then gets gridlocked. Fumes all over the place.
“A successful city is a moving city. When you’ve put some of these cycle lanes in that cause nothing but havoc, when you put cycle lanes in because you’re virtue signalling, that is unacceptable.
“The other thing that nobody seems to bring up, which is so important when we have gridlocked streets, is how do we expect our emergency services to get through? It is very important that ambulances, fire engines, police can get through the streets as quickly as possible, as well as the rest of us.
“So, I am pro cycling, but equally we must look at everybody else that uses the streets. And this war on the motorists must stop.”