If England does, as Boris Johnson has promised, enjoy a new era of mass walking and cycling, then two of the primary reasons could be lurking within the more technical and unglamorous elements of his £2bn policy announcement: updated regulations and a new watchdog. For countless years, while central government and local authorities talked up the benefits of safer streets and more cycling, too many of the actual bike lanes built ended up being little more than precipitously slim strips of paint, often ending abruptly. But under the new No 10 plans, bike lane design standards are not only being updated, but will be enforced by a body called Active Travel England. Billed as a travel equivalent of Ofsted, it can insist on certain designs, inspect what is built and withdraw funding from councils that are too tardy or unambitious. Veterans of the cycling world will detect in this tough approach the hand of Andrew Gilligan, who as Johnson’s cycling tsar when the PM was mayor of London pushed through a rapid second-term programme of bike lanes, metaphorically twisting the arms of certain councils to speed things up. Gilligan, like Johnson a journalist by trade, is now a No 10 adviser and is heavily involved in the walking and cycling programme. It has been welcomed by campaign groups – albeit with some warnings about the need for more funding – who detect in Johnson a politician who might, finally, instigate some sort of real change in active travel. For all the talk over several years of cycling booms, riding a bike for transport remains distinctly niche, with only 1-2% of all trips across the UK made via cycling, a figure unchanged for years. Johnson is, famously, a keen city cyclist himself, even if high office means he now has to be ferried about by car. But he will be particularly keen on getting more Britons active as a parallel to his new anti-obesity strategy, boosting public health in a new world of pandemics.
While the focus on risk factors for Covid-19 has been mainly on weight, many of the comorbidities linked to poorer outcomes, such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, are just as closely connected to inactive living, which is estimated to causeabout 100,000 non-Covid deaths across the UK every year. Will the new announcement turn us into a Dutch-style nation of utility cyclists? No, not least because such transformations take decades, not years, and much will depend on consistent political will, and funding, over the very long term. But campaigners will be encouraged by the ambition, not least the effective ban on new paint-only bike lanes. They will also welcome moves to create more low-traffic neighbourhoods, which block rat-running motor vehicles. For all the focus on separated bike routes, on smaller roads the way to encourage both cyclists and pedestrians is fewer cars, with those remaining travelling at lower speeds, something that sounds simple but has proved politically very difficult. Johnson has made it something of a trademark to promise a “golden era” for walking and cycling. This is a start. Whether it amounts to more than that will necessarily take time. • The main image of this article was changed on 28 July 2020 to one more appropriate to the facts of the story.