Active travel

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It does compute... cycling was seriously impractical in Paris before the arrival of rental schemes 15 years ago. everyone in flats without any kind of bike storage, there was meant to be a boost. One can't compare flat living inside paris with comfy home-owning in zone 3...

If numbers were reliable and connected with journey maps, i am sure the situation wouldn't be so different, especially post-covid

The Guardian now has a string of articles about people giving up on cycling.
I noticed myself that nobody is really cycling, there are some pinch points in the city were you see cyclists in larger groups during peak times but that are just the few ones from all over London that get compressed into a small area. On my way in the morning from Woolwich up to Deptford there is almost nobody around compared to car traffic.
Same with the shopping area in Charlton, grid lock on the roads, rammed car parks and empty cycle racks and that's with immaculate access for cycling and walking from the east and west completely separated from cars.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/01/number-of-people-cycling-in-england-falls-a-year-after-2bn-plan

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/sep/01/i-will-never-ride-a-bike-again-why-people-are-giving-up-on-cycling

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/03/cycling-dangerous-children-pandemic-closed-lanes-tacks-road

What jumped out for me was the comment someone made about only cycling when they are able to be psyched up and confident.

shopping area in Charlton, ...
with immaculate access for cycling and walking from the east and west completely separated from cars. .

Where is this?

That middle article link chimed with me when I read it yesterday. I noticed a few times recently drivers doing this shooing gesture as I wait to cross the road at a junction. Only started seeing this in the last few years. Like a gesture you would do to an irritating wasp, rather than open-hand offer saying "you are safe to cross". It's kind of sad, I think a lot of motorists fell into the Top Gear / Daily Mail lazy anti-bicycle rhetoric. There is a lot of anger on the roads. The 'new dawn' of cycling popularity post-2012 fell flat pretty quickly. A cynic might say that an ebike future might be more about the e than the bike. We have to be constantly consuming these days. Regular bikes are dangerous because they are cheap, self-empowering, healthy and offer freedom.

Charlton... with immaculate access for cycling

FWIW I cycle daily from Putney to Woolwich and the Charlton stretch is one of the worst bits of road on the whole 25km route.
It has never once been swept or cleaned and every inch is strewn with glass, it's bumpy, filled with pedestrians standing in it by bus stops, drivers swing across the cycle path to turn into junctions without looking/caring. I hate it and I get a puncture there every couple of weeks

I am wondering how much impact post covid, post lockdown, current world fuck up stress is having on how much people are cycling.

I am just much more tired than I was a few years ago, and if I try to cycle commute every day it totally wipes me out. I enjoy it (ish) and it's slightly quicker than public transport, and it's not a long ride (about 40min). Perhaps it's simple lack of fitness after too much WFH plus a bit of aging, but I wonder whether across the population we are all just tired.

This is the route I usually use through the area, the blue bits show the access to different parts of the retail park.

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I agree about the state of the surfaces but to avoid all the other stuff I use the traffic free paths closer to the river, it might be less direct but then there are no traffic lights for 6-7km.

A while back after a spate of road deaths I started this bllod on the streets thread
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/239236/

Postulated then that we're in a transition ending the rule of the car drivers in cities.

Transitional periods are often bumpy. Takes a while for people to reset their brains and get it.