Boris Johnson’s Green Industrial Revolution Promises Thousands Of Miles Of ‘Cycle Lanes Worthy Of Holland’ But Pledges No New Cash

“We must increase the share of journeys taken by public transport, cycling, and walking,” says point five in a ten-point plan for a £12 billion Green Industrial Revolution launched November 18 by U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“We will give our towns and cities cycle lanes worthy of Holland,” added the document, but without pledging any new cash.

“We will build first hundreds, then thousands, of miles of segregated cycle lane [sic] and create more low-traffic neighborhoods to stop rat-running and allow people to walk and cycle,” continued the document.

As well as transport—with the headline-dominating pledge to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030—the Prime Minister’s ten-point plan covers clean energy, nature, and innovative technologies.

The U.K. is next year hosting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties 26 (COP26) summit in Glasgow, and today’s Green Industrial Revolution announcement is part of the boosting for that.

Only £3 billion of the £12 billion announced is fresh cash.

The government promised that, by 2025, the U.K. would see a doubling of cycling rates.

This is a promise that has been made before.

In 1996, the Conservative government launched the National Cycling Strategy aiming to double cycle use by 2002 and double it again by 2012. (Hint: the aim missed.)

Transport Minister Steven Norris launched the strategy. A former car dealer self-billed as a convert to cycling’s cause, although not himself a cyclist, Norris has subsequently backpedaled on his commitment to cycling, tweeting in August this year that “for millions [cycling is] just not an option. Suggesting it’s the answer to all our capacity ills is facile and unhelpful.”

However, back in 1996, Norris said that the National Cycling Strategy was a “major breakthrough in transport thinking.” The following year Tony Blair’s New Labour won a landslide election, and—among many other things associated with this Cool Britannia period of British politics—the National Cycling Strategy was adopted wholesale by the incoming government.

John “Two Jags” Prescott became transport secretary, and he appointed Norris as chairman of the National Cycling Strategy Board, charged with continuing what he had started.

The National Cycling Strategy Board later evolved into Cycling England, but Norris failed to boost bicycle use. Why? The National Cycling Strategy had no cash, the board supposed to be delivering it had no teeth, there was no buy-in from the top, from Blair.

Fast forward to 2020. The government now has a cycling (and walking) policy with (some) cash, a few promised teeth, and buy-in from the prime minister. Earlier this year, Johnson said he wanted to “kick off the most radical change to our cities since the arrival of mass motoring” and promised to build “thousands of miles of protected cycle routes in towns and cities” with an initial £2 billion budget.

Heady stuff, and just one part of an ambitious program led by Number 10 transport adviser Andrew Gilligan, the former journalist who persuaded Johnson, when he was the mere Mayor of London, to scrap painted Cycle Superhighways and protect them with curbs instead.

However, without a guaranteed and swift investment of many billions of pounds it will be impossible to convert Johnson’s latest promises on bicycling into reality.