Newsletter July 2025

Everyone is welcome to join these summer rides

• Camden Summer Bike Adventure
Sunday July 27 2025, 12:00 – 3:30pm
Meeting at Talacre Gardens, Kentish Town
Gentle 6 miles suitable for everyone. Fun for children with playgrounds, music, and whistles.
Ideal for families including children who can ride independently, cargo bikes and trailers etc.
Book your place here

• Kentish Town Pedals
Saturday August 2 2025, 10am – 12pm
Meeting at Peckwater Centre, Kentish Town
Gentle 5-6 miles suitable for everyone.
Join us for our regular monthly bike ride to explore the local area, keep active, build riding confidence and have fun.

The Congestion Charging scheme was introduced in February 2003.

TfL’s proposals include a £3 increase (up from £15 to £18) and a discount for E-cars, to come into effect from January 2026.

Noting that E-cars contribute as much to congestion as internal combustion engines, and E-SUVs even more so, perhaps this is another opportunity to tell the mayor to ‘dream big’?

Some suggestions:

•⁠ ⁠Restore the original pre-2023 operating hours
07.00 to 22.00, that included weekends.

• …Better still, make it 24/7

• Steeper escalation in charges (it was 2012 when a  £25.00 SUV surcharge was proposed! What should that be NOW?

•⁠ ⁠Inclusion of factors like weight, size, consumption of resources and energy.

• How about restoring the Western Extension (WEZ)?

• Implement Smart and Fair Road User Charging

• Exempt shared EVs from the proposals as they enable some people to avoid car ownership

Regent Street, Haymarket, and Piccadilly Circus public realm is being reimagined by Westminster City Council & The Crown Estate

They would like to hear your thoughts on the public realm; that is the space between buildings: streets, squares, gardens and other spaces.

Why not let WCC & CE know that, whilst the proposals are good, we need far more, to reallocate space to green transport modes like cycling, and reduce the intolerable blight of through motor traffic – noting the comparatively giant steps being taken by Rotterdam, Pontevedra, Lyons and Berlin and more besides.

Read LCC’s take on the Regent Street proposals here.

Suggestions:

• Safe, high-quality cycle tracks that don’t give up at junctions

• Safe space for cycling at Piccadilly Circus itself

• A plan for low traffic across the whole West End

The site of the present Camden High Street Trial was where the first Reclaim The Streets Protests took place.

Widely esteemed transport campaigner Roger Geffen, formerly with Cycling UK amongst many others, now with TAN and Low Traffic Futures, Roger’s campaigning career began as a volunteer with LCC in the late 1980s LCC and Reclaim The Streets where he helped to bring a halt to the Tory government’s ‘biggest road building plans since the Romans’

Missed the recent Clean Cities Network Zoom event with Marco te Brömmelstroet, the Cycling Professor and chair of Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam? Need some holiday reading? Sounds as if it’s time for some deeper reflection with the @fietsprofessor while you wait for the online video!

Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet is a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets.

How can we shift our understanding and language, shaped by decades of transportation engineering and spatial planning that have reduced the value of streets to that of an efficient machine, to the city as a human encounter?

We need the imagination to rediscover the streets, develop a different language, and take radical measures to prioritise walking and cycling that resist speed, repetition, and quantification of everyday life.

The only hill climb event in London, UHC offers riders the chance to test themselves against Swain’s Lane.

For many it’s less about the challenge of beating a set time, but just getting up the hill, spurred on by cheers, cow bells, pots and pans, and horns.
Various cycling categories and age groups catered for with a bike and a bit of nerve can conquer Swain’s, from the young novices to the hill climbing veterans.

++ A new Streetsblog video, made after a visit by Streetfilms’ Clarence Eckerson to London featuring local campaigners alongside Will Norman, is a celebration of the capital’s burgeoning cycling-city transformation: it received 60,000 views in the first 24 hours!

++ A coalition of parents and organisations called for Wimbledon tennis organisers to drop their [repeated] Range Rover sponsorship (the same brand of car driven into a Wimbledon primary school picnic, killing two girls and injuring parents and children). Lambeth might become the first UK council to follow Paris’ weight-based charges for these vehicles that impose greater risk of fatal injuries to cyclists and pedestrians.

++ Rating London boroughs on active travel progress and road danger reduction, the 2025 London Healthy Streets Scorecard found 98 new traffic-free school streets and more 20mph limits and parking controls. Progress was slower on bike lanes, and also LTNs, despite the Evening Standard fanfare “You can’t argue with the data––LTNs are officially saving lives … London’s cars have become killers … 23,000 road collisions in 2023, and 100+ deaths .. London is too densely populated for current vehicle numbers’ – echoed by the Guardian: “London’s low-traffic zones ‘cut deaths & injuries by more than a third”, while chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, called for more focus on the indisputable data to benefit those who stand to benefit from physical activity.

++ However, just as ten billion for the new Lower Thames ‘traffic tunnel’ is already ‘insuffiicient’, National Highways will gain more funds, to block the world’s longest walking and cycling tunnel with concrete (deja-vu?); just as incentives are offered to buyers of new (e)-cars (consuming scarce battery resources that would be more sensibly prioritised for e-(cargo) bikes.

++ ‘Mountain-biking’ with conviction. “Like millions of others, I weep inside daily for the horrific situation in Gaza that’s getting worse by the day. Hope is an active force, so, at 83, I respond how I know best—by cycling up a mountain.” Anne Jones, from London, cycled 2,115m up the Col du Tourmalet to raise funds.

++ Berlin’s Constitutional Court has ruled that “Autofrei Berlin” (Car-free Berlin) can go ahead with a referendum on whether the city should essentially ban cars and other private vehicles within the S-Bahn ring. The aims are to create safer streets for children and cyclists, improve air quality, and more public recreational spaces; all of which are denied by motor traffic. The car-free zone Volksentscheid Berlin Autofrei aim to create will be the size of London’s zones 1 & 2.

++ “Cycling in Paris has transcended mere trendiness; it’s now a fundamental part of the city’s identity” says Deputy Mayor David Belliard of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts. In 2015 the plan to make Paris a “100% cycling city” was set in motion by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, with €150m to double cycle lane numbers and create a critical mass of infrastructure. Further investment followed and with no signs of slowing down, just a year ago a huge $2bn investment was made to promote cycling across France over the next four years.