This new advice pits road users against one another. Credit: Getty
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It’s hard to fathom the logic behind Active Travel England’s latest advice that road lanes should be narrowed across Britain. The statutory body, established in 2022 to encourage cycling and walking, has now suggested in a new document released last week that road lanes — which have been set at 12 feet (3.6 metres) since before car usage took off — should be shrunk to stop vehicles overtaking cyclists. In an ever-fragmenting bureaucratic landscape, with cars seen as an issue to be managed or reduced, setting road users with different needs off against each other is hardly a rational choice, especially when there is no consideration for second-order impacts.
There are plenty of issues to find with this decision, from the antagonistic relationship that it creates between different road users to the total lack of imagination for the future of transport use. For instance, could a bus lane one day be added? It is telling that the foundational document for Active Travel England — “Gear Change: a bold vision for cycling and walking”, which was published by the Department of Transport in 2020 — stated that “cyclists must be separated from volume traffic, both at junctions and on the stretches of road between them”. And yet, five years into its life, it is advocating for nothing of the sort, trammelled by a wider culture in which resources are managed downwards.
The great Modernist architect Le Corbusier used to say that Venice was his favourite city. He’d explain that the independence of the city’s walkways from its traffic made it a pedestrian’s paradise. He used it as his model for the elevated highways in his urban plans that would enable arterial traffic to speed along, leaving pedestrians in peace. With the rise of car use, the separation of vehicles and pedestrians became one of the central ideas of British transport planning. To keep traffic flowing and preserve town centres, planners built bypasses. Anyone driving into the centre would park at multi-storey car parks and walk to a pedestrianised high street, sometimes via underpasses as traffic rumbled overhead.
For urban reasons more than transport ones, this separation has been unpicked since the Nineties. It was felt that underpasses and plazas created poor urban environments; instead of trying to improve these, road engineers removed strategic roads or bypasses from their plans. This was done to revitalise high streets, the logic being that access to out-of-town supermarkets was killing trade rather than anything else. It was also carried out in order to dampen traffic speed and volume.
Once you start using buildings and town centres themselves as traffic-calming measures, it’s not a massive leap to start using other road users in a similar way. Despite a massive expansion of cycling infrastructure in London over the last decade, as well as a substantial increase in the number of people using bikes, cycling is less safe now than it was in 2016. Bike lanes have been placed on key routes for cars, rather than on side streets or through parks, not just to encourage cycling but to discourage car journeys. The effect is to put cyclists in direct conflict with cars, as well as bus users.
We are constantly told by cycling lobbies to follow the Dutch, whose road system is frequently acclaimed as the best in Europe. With its independent cycle lanes, the Netherlands simply has more options. Meanwhile, the British approach to road design is predicated on the belief that people must be coerced into new behaviours — even if these are impossible or undesired — by slowly withdrawing offers. It is, quite literally, a narrowing of choice.
Tim Abrahams writes about architecture and is host of the podcast Superurbanism.

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