Road user charge plan to fund transport improvements in Greater Cambridge

Alfie Packham and Guardian readers
The proportion of adults in England who say they cycle at least once a month has fallen to 13.1%, the lowest figure since records began in 2015-16. Here, readers from around the UK explain why they have given up riding their bikes on the road.
‘Riding at peak traffic times? No, thank you’

Mark Sutton Wednesday, 31 August 2022

The long-running standoff between Transport for London (TfL) and the Conservative Government this week settled on a £1.2bn funding offer, albeit one described as “far from ideal” in respect of a shortfall that will drive up public transport costs and see budgets slashed.
Cycling will not be immune from the funding pains that Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan is tasked with explaining to Londoners looking to slash transport costs in the face of rising inflation. The shortfall, according to Khan, is around £600 million, but will be enough to avert the worst case proposal of a managed decline of many tube and bus services.

I felt like a bit of a legend when I started cycling in London 18 years ago. Everyone was always congratulating me on my bravery. “Oh, you wouldn’t catch me on a bike,” people would say if they spotted my helmet or the cycling shorts peeking out beneath my dress. “Far too dangerous.”
To be fair, it was quite hairy at times. Cycle superhighways were yet to be invented; bike lanes were marked out in paint, at best, rather than protected by any kind of physical barrier; and cab drivers still seemed surprised to see me. Young and dumb enough to believe myself invincible, I rather enjoyed the sense of peril, timing my turns to avoid getting wiped out by a bendy bus and feeling like a warrior princess at the end of every commute. I was sometimes on the receiving end of catcalls – “Lucky saddle!” or “Ride me instead!” – but no one seemed to actively hate me. Those were the days.

Michael Goodier
A cyclist on a cycle superhighway in Shadwell, London. Cycling UK has issued a plea for proper cycling infrastructure. Photograph: Nathaniel Noir/Alamy
Boris Johnson’s “cycling revolution” has so far failed to build on the gains made during the pandemic, as the proportion of people cycling at least once a week has fallen to its lowest recorded level in England.

Paula Cocozza
Len Collingwood, a clinical nurse specialist in psychotherapy, retired on his 65th birthday. He had made a deal with his wife, Sally: she would train as a yoga teacher and he would “start out as an adventure cyclist”.

Four months later, he set off on a 13,000km cycle ride from Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia to Edinburgh, much of it roughly shadowing Marco Polo’s Silk Road. No sooner had he started out than a snowstorm hit. He hid in his tent, wearing every item of clothing he had packed. At -18C it was too cold to venture outside to cook. He survived the next 48 hours by eating a “massive bag of Snickers and Crunchies” his colleagues had given him when he retired.