A property group has warned that London’s cycling policy is actually harming the environment, with too many cycle bays and not enough cyclists to fill them.
The City Property Association (CPA) has calculated that under the current London Plan, the City of London’s target to deliver 1.2 million sqm of new office space by 2040 would come with a requirement for 25,000 additional cycle parking spaces.
With the creation of each cycle bay producing around 1.29 tonnes of carbon, the CPA has estimated the total carbon impact of the 2040 target to be 21,500 tonnes.
However, around 86 per cent of cycle parking bays in new City developments are unused, according to the CPA.
“We need to ensure cycle parking requirements accurately reflect the needs of the City… Providing cycle facilities at the scale required by the London Plan comes with a huge carbon and capital cost, with tall buildings disproportionately impacted,” Ross Sayers, Chair of the CPA and Head of Development Management at Landsec, said.
Most workers ‘too far away’ to cycle to work
The City of London’s plan, which mandates one cycle parking space per 75 sqm of gross external building area, is based on the assumption that one in five Londoners will cycle to work.
However, the CPA has suggested this is “too high” for the capital, with just 36 per cent of workers living within 10km of their office.
“Great swathes of unused cycle parking [are] now seen in large basements across the City of London,” David Hart, CPA Board and Founding Director of Momentum Transport Consultancy, said:
“The specific characteristics of the City of London mean that there is little prospect of today’s policy compliant levels of cycle parking ever being achieved.
“In order to reduce the overall carbon footprint of City buildings, it is clear that we need to support active travel without constructing significant basement space that will be underutilised,” Hart said.
However, there are multiple other blocks to cycling to work: A lack of cycle ways is significant, as is the number of cars of the road, with many potential cyclists worried about cycling on busy roads.
Only 27 per cent of Londoners lived within 400 meters of a cycleway as of last September, according to TfL. In Amsterdam, where almost all roads have bicycle lanes and cycling culture is prevalent, 43 per cent of workers bike to the office.
A report from the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) found that one in three women stopped cycling altogether after dark or in winter due to a lack of safe routes.
“Imagine how popular cycling would be if all inner London sorted out their networks,” an LCC report said. “And don’t even get us started on outer London…”