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(hat tip to Oliver for the recommendation, many moons ago)
Ha, I can't even remember that, but glad you're enjoying it.
The thing that you always have to consider about those European cities is that there isn't a single one among them which has achieved greater rates of cycling in their town centre without building far more roads and actually increasing private motor traffic. This often doesn't show up in statistics for town centres simply because the orbital capacity can be beyond the administrative limits of the city. (Also, Copenhagen always had a relatively high share of cycling compared to London, for instance--London had very early development of public transport, so had significantly less cycling than the ~60-70% modal shares (of vehicular traffic, not including walking) of cycling in European cities in the 1930s.)
Basically, they have all made a simple trade-off--more walking and cycling in the centre, more sprawl and driving on the outskirts, or indeed on their trunk road network--e.g. Denmark has joined up its motorway system, meaning that it's now possible to drive from Germany to Sweden on motorways. This may at first seem an attractive trade-off, but in practice it leads to a vastly increased need to travel--it benefits big(ger) business, meaning that employment and shopping locations tend to become less localised.
Where people have much further to travel, cycling falls (e.g., levels of rural cycling in Denmark and the Netherlands), and this tends to be masked by the parallel rise in urban centres. Eventually, this catches up not only with villages but with larger centres, too, and more and more people can no longer work in their own town but have to commute to another town. Few people, if any, will cycle that sort of distance. Where employment moves away, it also means that the rest of the local economy suffers.
London has a unique chance to try and avoid more road-building and to experience genuine modal shift. While it does have a seriously damaging ring road in the M25, and a damaging semicircle road in the A406 North Circular Road, London is so vast that the effect of the M25 is comparatively remote, unlike for all those smaller towns in Europe, and the A406 doesn't go all the way around. (The Inner Ring Road, by contrast, isn't really a 'ring road', merely a continuous sequence of streets linked by a common name and certain traffic management measures to favour orbital motor traffic.) There is very limited scope for more road-building (not that that has stopped the Mayor's Roads Task Force from advocating bonkers plans like the underground orbital motorway), and London has a chance to experience genuine modal shift.
The effect of modal filtering as in Waltham Forest should be greater viability of locally-based business, both from the liveability angle and also, simply, because scope for motor traffic that merely passes through to go elsewhere is reduced, potentially reducing opportunities and incentives for 'leap-frogging' centres in chains of centres. (Ideally, it should be possible to either stay in one's own centre or at the most go to the nearest one.)
The upshot for cycling is that where more trips become shorter, a greater base of cycleable trips is created and more cycling will occur.
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Oliver Schick
@bothwell
I am reading Straphanger at the moment
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Straphanger-Saving-Cities-Ourselves-Automobile-ebook/dp/B0071VUU3I/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=
(hat tip to Oliver for the recommendation, many moons ago)
Currently on the chapter about how Copenhagen became what it is today and there is a short paragraph about how data was being collected about pedestrians in the Strøget, and how whenever a businessman claimed to have been ruined by pedestrianisation the mayor's office was able to say, well we've got data here showing 6000 more people a day passing your shop than they were five years ago, are you sure you're a good businessman?
Made me smile. Looks like Cophenhagen went through all the same things we're going through now, plus ça change and all that. Data, hard data, relating to the streets and areas that are being changed, published openly and transparently is what's needed for everyone's benefit right now.