London's Media is Seriously Hating on Bicycle Lanes

“Cycle lanes lunacy!” screamed a headline in Britain’s Daily Mail this week. The paper is in a fury about London’s recently opened cycle superhighways—arterial bike lanes that have finally offered London cyclists some segregated protection from motor traffic. These new routes’ cardinal sin, according to the Mail, is that they have gobbled up space properly reserved for cars, squeezing them into fewer lanes like restive camels being herded through an excruciatingly narrow needle’s eye. Central roads are packed, especially along the remodeled Thames Embankment. Meanwhile the cycle paths next to them lie empty, the Mail claims, filled only with clouds of pollution from the lines of stalled cars.

There’s a problem with these assertions. They aren’t true. A brief check of the facts reveals that the number of cyclists using these arterial routes has increased by 60 percent since they got separate bike lanes. In some areas, there are even signs of a long sought-after modal shift. On Blackfriars Bridge, a key link between South London and the city’s financial district, cyclists now make up seventy percent of all traffic at times during the day.