CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
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It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
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Paralleling other debates about comparable cities - do we have a sense of which modes people have shifted from in different cities?
i.e. in some places do more people shift from cars->bikes while in others shift is mainly bus-> bike or walk->bike?
and is there any analysis of how and why this differs (if it does)?
Not directly about the shift but some figures on different modes in Europe from David Hembrow http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/10/go-vilnius-or-what-future-should.html
The best analysis I'm aware of has been carried out by Transport for London, which published an "Analysis of Cycling Potential" in 2010:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/analysis-of-cycling-potential.pdf.pdf
Page 31 is particularly interesting - highlighting that much of the increase in cycling is due to current cyclists actually cycling more, with only a small increase in new cyclists.
"due to current cyclists actually cycling more, with only a small increase in new cyclists"
I'm confident that is no longer the case in Edinburgh (and London).
- unless a lot of people have been doing short trips on canal, NEPN etc. and are now braving the road - lots more people about recently (not just rush hour).
I wondered that at the Bicycle Culture by Design lecture. Are cyclists in Europe just displaced walkers?
I seem to deal with families who are active anyway and are wanting to increase their use of human power - initially for getting round town but often that escalates to longer tours! If there was nowhere to cycle many of these would walk I reckon. Common for mum and dad to walk with kid on scooter or pavement bike around town. Often see adults cycling on pavement with heir kids in tow too so for them it is a kind of walking experience.
Biking in Amsterdam and Copenhagen is akin to walking as MCA says.
Looking at centre of Edinburgh on Sunday when MCA was about to leave I saw about ten bikes in half an hour, hundreds of people walking and a lot of cars with one person in them. The High St is just a mass of people and anyone on a bike would have problem getting through. At the Hub the road is open to traffic but people just walk over it due to volume of numbers.
Our transport balance is of course disturbed by the fact the public transport system is infrequent on Sunday and parking is free (often using bike and bus lanes).
During the week we seem to have cyclists in survival mode and i wondered whether the lack of these cyclists on a Sunday was that our hard core need time off?!
I'm doing infinitely more cycling now than I was 6 years ago and I'm a displaced walker or bus user for any cross city centre trips. And probably a displaced driver for trips further afield.
Cyclists now make up more than 50% of vehicle movements over the various Thames bridges. In my mind it's hard to attribute that rise to increased cycling by the same number of cyclists (unless they are riding laps on the bridges before heading to work, which seems unlikely)
I found this a while ago - lots of stuff about modal share in different countries over time, by age group, etc:
http://policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/pucher/TRNWesternEurope.pdf
Some key points:
>About a quarter of the modal split in NL is walking (about the same as the UK), and the same again for cycling
>DK has less cycling than NL and less walking than NL/UK
>The UK has experienced a catastrophic decline in walking, even in recent years, and despite regular claims that cycling is "booming" the modal share for that has been stuck very firmly at 2% for decades
>At least we're not as bad as the USA
I think an increase in cycling often comes with a decrease in public transport usage - I recall hearing that Hong Kong didn't wish to promote cycling in order to protect its public transportation. Although I don't have the primary source for this idea...
However it seems reasonable - folk might use public transportation because their perception is:
Which looks like a list of reasons to take the bike!
Of course there's another for the bike:
And another for the bus:
Robert
David Hembrow mentioned on the study tour that in Cambridge, the council had been reluctant to promote park and cycle because it might cannibalise bus usage from the park and ride sites, whereas in the Netherlands, they don't care what you use as long as you're not driving into town.
Conversely in London, where the public transport (particularly the tube) system is more or less at capacity, a lot of the drive for cycling is because it costs a lot less than digging a new tube line or extending platforms to make trains longer.
Dave - I am sure there are new cyclists in London, especially central London. However, it is worth remembering that the numbers cycling over a few Thames bridges are tiny compared with the number travelling under/over the river by train and tube, or simply walking over the bridges. Also, the buses that cross the river may be fewer in number, but carry very large numbers of passengers. I'm fairly certain that cyclists represent a much smaller share of cross-Thames traffic than might appear to be the case.
Also, should say that "regular cyclists" includes those who take a weekly pootle - a fairly large group with considerable potential to increase the amount of cycling they do.
Yep, no doubt that the Thames bridges are only a small snapshot. I have to admit that I've only skimmed the TfL PDF but it seemed to me to be based on asking people what they're up to in a survey, rather than actually counting (perhaps I should pick it up for another pass).
For my 2p, there are massively more individual cyclists than there were when I moved to Edinburgh a few years back. It may be that they also do more trips per person, of course, but there are now short moments of traffic jam on NEPN where it used to be deserted. If we're not careful we may just end up moving traffic jams from the roads to the paths :P
I remember working in Cambridge, when they extended the Park n Ride to the Business Park on the north side of town. They instructed bus drivers not to allow passengers get on without prepaid tickets bought from the PnR depot for the first ~3 bus stops from the PnR. Thus, if you wondered out of work and wanted to get the bus into town, you'd have to walk 3/4 mile back past a couple of bus stops to buy a ticket. They did offer weekly tickets but for the occasional traveller into the centre it was easier and more attractive to just drive out of work and into town.
Later on they moved the Park n Ride further out to the outside of the A14, as most traffic on a morning was heading into Cambridge. The existing 2 year old PnR site lay disussed after than fenced off to prevent anyone parking there.... Madness!!!!
Some figures in the latest Copenhagen cycle account (page 9) http://subsite.kk.dk/sitecore/content/Subsites/CityOfCopenhagen/SubsiteFrontpage/LivingInCopenhagen/CityAndTraffic/~/media/4ADB52810C484064B5085F2A900CB8FB.ashx
It's hard to see from the graph because they're all on top of each other but it does look as if the rise in cycling from 1996 has largely come at the expense of the car. Bus use has also fallen, but they've built a metro since then and obviously use has gone up so I'd say public transport's share remains about the same
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