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Build it and they will come? Why Britain's 1960s cycling revolution flopped

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...pped-stevenage

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- Stevenage, the first of England’s post-war New Towns, was widely proclaimed in the 1960s as a shining example of how the provision of high-quality, joined-up cycle infrastructure would encourage many people to cycle – not just keen cyclists. The town, 30 miles north of London, had wide, smooth cycleways next to its main roads which were separated from cars and pedestrians. There were well-lit, airy underpasses beneath roundabouts, and schools, workplaces and shops were all linked by protected cycleways.

- Stevenage still has these cycleways. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, it was put forward as proof that the UK could build a Dutch-style cycle network. An article in New Scientist magazine in 1973 claimed that “Stevenage cycleways and cycle underpasses [are] premiere exhibits … [in a] traffic revolution.” This revolution flopped. Few outsiders have any inkling that Stevenage is veined with the kind of separated cycleways commonplace in the Netherlands, and even locals are largely unaware they have a 23-mile cycle network.

- The borough council did not apply to become a “cycling demonstration town” when Cycling England offered fat grants for local authorities to encourage cycle use in 2005. The organisation was seeking “low hanging fruit”, and if its expert board members had been aware of Stevenage’s cycleways at the time they might have chosen to target the town in a bid to boost bike use, says former Cycling England head Phillip Darnton. “Stevenage would have been interesting because it clearly already had some good cycling infrastructure,” he adds, “but a burning question would have been, why wasn’t it being used?”

- Eric Claxton, the lead designer of post-war Stevenage, had believed that use of cycleways would be high if they were well built – originally thinking that Britain’s hostile road environment discouraged people from cycling. Construction of the cycleway network was given the go-ahead in 1950, built at the same time as the primary road network. Stevenage was compact, and Claxton assumed the provision of 12 ft-wide cycleways and 7 ft-wide pavements would encourage residents to walk and cycle. He had witnessed the high usage of Dutch cycleways, and he believed the same could be achieved in the UK.

- But to Claxton’s puzzlement and eventual horror, residents of Stevenage chose to drive – even for journeys of two miles or less. Stevenage’s 1949 masterplan projected that 40% of the town’s residents would cycle each day, and just 16% would drive. The opposite happened. By 1964, cycle use was down to 13%; by 1972, it had dropped to 7%. (Today it has less than half that, and yet some neighbouring towns with few cycleways have cycling modal shares of 4-5%.) Claxton poured scorn on those who chose motorcars rather than bicycles, complaining that motorists “seem to have a problem with their logic” because “they use their cars as shopping baskets, or use them as overcoats”.

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