Traffic congestion is caused not by cycleways but by too many cars, trucks and vans. This, one would assume, is patently obvious. But not according to many trusted news sources which are today blaming cycleways for making London the most congested city in the world. The ill-researched stories are based on a press release from the automotive traffic data service Inrix.

The American company has released its 2021 INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard. This matrix identifies and ranks congestion and mobility trends across more than 1,000 global cities. London is now ranked by Inrix as the world’s most congested city, partly because it was the first to bounce back economically after Covid lockdowns.
Drivers in the U.K. “lost” 148 hours this year in traffic, states a press release from Inrix. The Inrix scorecard report does not blame cycleways for traffic congestion. The report only mentions cycleways once, and German ones to boot.

Peter Walker
Fairly early on Monday morning last week I got a call from a radio station: could I come on to discuss a study showing London is the world’s most congested city, and this is because of cycle lanes. Hang on, I replied – say all that again?
As it turned out, I never appeared (someone else got the part). But, intrigued, I looked into the research which supposedly showed all this. And that was when things started to get strange.

Environment Secretary George Eustice MP has criticised a traffic reduction trial in Teddington’s Bushy Park, stating that he would “prefer to see the park re-opened.”
The Conservative MP said closing the roads in the park to traffic has “increased congestion and associated problems around surrounding roads” and expressed his scepticism of the scheme.
But he agreed that the decision is in the hands of The Royal Parks, the charity which manages Bushy Park.
Mr Eustice, who lives not far from Bushy Park, made the comments in an email to a local resident.
The email was reported on by local news station Radio Jackie this morning.
A spokesperson for the Royal Parks defended the scheme. 

Owning a car could become a fad of the past, a government minister claimed this week.

Junior transport minister Trudy Harrison, 45, told a sustainability conference owning a car was outdated ’20th-century thinking’ and the country should move to ‘shared mobility’ to cut carbon emissions.
Almost 80% of households in the UK own a car according to figures by Statista for 2020.
That accounts for 63.5 million households owning at least one car out of a total 80.7 million.Ms Harrison, who is also a former parliamentary private secretary to Boris Johnson, said the UK was ‘reaching a tipping point where shared mobility in the form of car clubs, scooters and bike shares will soon be a realistic option for many of us to get around.’

Summary

Projections indicate there will be two billion motor vehicles on the roads by 2030, most of them still powered by fossil fuels. Apart from the obvious implications for climate change, this trend also spells public health as well as environmental problems on an unprecedented scale. Michael Gross reports.
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From the sheer amount of bad news coming through the 24/7 news cycle, one may get the impression that the world is on the road to apocalypse. To counter this impression, the German news magazine Der Spiegel now publishes one trend every week that points in the right direction. Diseases have been eradicated, child labour reduced, flying is safer, etc. One of these silver linings concerns road traffic deaths in Germany. They peaked in 1970 at a horrific 58 people dying on the roads per day. Back then, the comparison often used to convince people afraid of flying was that the massacre on the roads corresponded to one fully booked jumbo jet crashing out of the skies over Western Germany every single week.