Title: Potholes and Pavements: A Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network

Author: Laura Laker

Completed: October 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: This book was harder for me to get through than many of the others about infrastructure and I’m not sure why. As shown by the highlights below, there were many pieces that I loved.

I realized early in the book that much of the work done to set up the National Cycle Network was underway while I lived there yet I knew nothing about it. My hope is that they can overcome many of the challenges Laura outlines and implement the suggested improvements before my next trip to the UK. I look forward to riding several of the routes and allowing my daughter explore with greater independence. I also hope the US can look at what is being done in the UK so we can get beyond the excuse that, “we’re not The Netherlands.”

Highlights:

• the 2022 National Travel Survey found that in England 71% of all trips we made were less than five miles. You or I could cycle that in less than 30 minutes, saving money, and fitting in a bit of exercise and, dare I say it, joy, into our day.
• Between half and three quarters of Brits want to cycle more, both for everyday trips and for fun, and polls say we support investment in everyday routes and leisure routes, even if it means taking road space from cars. The main reason we don’t cycle more is an understandable fear of sharing space with motor traffic.
• In Leicester, one of the many cities to embrace the challenge, a mile per week of new main-road bike lanes were rolled out at their peak, at just over £29,000 per mile – a bargain basement price when you consider a trunk road comes in somewhere at around £1 billion per mile.
• In the 1950s, cycling was a very normal means of transport in the UK: around a third of distance travelled was by bike, which was more than in the Netherlands at the time.
• Pedestrians and cyclists were sidelined and, as motor vehicles were increasingly prioritised, traffic volumes grew, and walking and cycling felt less and less safe or appealing. Public transport was on the decline, too, and access to the streets – a public space – increasingly required access to a car.
• The Green Cross Code was relaunched in 1978 with David Prowse, the actor who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films, instructing pedestrians on how not to get run down in the street. This is a trend that continues today in road safety campaigns that hand hi-vis jackets to children walking to school, but fail to tackle the driver behaviour that puts them at risk.
• Around 75 men and women lay down in Bristol’s Castle Park, forming the spokes of an enormous wheel, with bicycles on kickstands sporting colourful balloons as its rim. Grimshaw later claimed this act was deemed so offensive to a nearby hotel that the council was persuaded to landscape the park to prevent it happening again.
• ‘It’s easy to motivate people, really. You have to give them a challenge, don’t you?’
• By the 2005 deadline there were a whopping 10,000 miles of designated routes. If their early work juggling funding, multiple construction projects and a far-flung workforce on a shoestring was impressive, this achievement was truly monumental. When the dust settled, they had raised £200 million for the work, more than quadrupling the original Lottery fund.
• it links together ancient travelways, including Roman roads, canal towpaths, disused railway lines (including viaducts and tunnels) and drovers’ roads,’ with a handful of brand-new bridges now connecting them. Revived, once again these ancient travelways linked places and landscapes. They connected city, town and village dwellers with green space, artwork, history – and one another.
• These barriers are mostly installed with the understandable purpose of keeping motorbikes off foot and cycle paths, but in doing so they keep anyone with a non-standard cycle out, including tricycles and cargo cycles that carry children or luggage, and some even require panniers or even less conveniently, a child seat to be removed. Sustrans’ barrier removal is a slow process and often landowners permit cycling and walking on the condition that anti-motorcycle barriers are installed, even though they may not comply with disability legislation.
• At the entrance are some chunky metal pipes, bent into shapes to prevent motorbike access. Caroline says these were heating pipes discarded during the bulldozing of a local hospital and commandeered in typical John fashion. They went on to form a standard, albeit non-wheelchair-friendly, design across the network.
• I’d say it’s the kind of morning that makes you glad to be alive, but every morning on the bike does that for me.
• Following a growth in new cycle routes during the pandemic, the French government claimed there were now 50,000km of cycle routes – more than 18,000 miles more than Britain’s, albeit in a much larger geographical area. In early 2023 France pledged to spend €2 billion on cycle infrastructure and supporting measures over the following four years, with €250 million a year for bike routes alone, to double the cycle network by 2030 to 100,000km. Meanwhile, in Britain, cycling was still fighting for scraps.
• Attempts to keep those on foot and cycles safe have, perversely, tended to focus on those least able to prevent the carnage: cyclists and pedestrians themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these patchy initiatives encouraging the use of hi-vis, helmets and constant vigilance from anyone on foot or bike from childhood onward have not yielded the hoped-for improvements in road safety.
• Cycling isn’t fundamentally a dangerous activity; it’s actually more dangerous not getting regular exercise, in terms of our health
• Leaving university to join the police in 1999, by 2012 Andy had been promoted in record time to superintendent. Then a detective working on violent crime, his chief constable moved him to the role of ‘specialist operations’ in Northamptonshire police. This involved road policing and guns. Andy recalls saying, ‘I’ve never issued a traffic ticket, and I’ve never held a gun, so why on earth would I want to work there?’
• In trials in Manchester and London, proving Andy’s point, updated collision reports increased the proportion of crashes in which speeding was a factor by three to four times. What was assumed to be the cause of around 250 deaths a year nationwide is now understood to kill somewhere between 750 and 1000 people each year. That’s the equivalent of my entire secondary school dying each year because of people breaking the speed limit. Speeding is, in fact, a factor in around half of all road deaths. There are now plans to roll this change out nationwide.
• Even in the hardest cycling territory in the UK, 10% of people could commute by bike. In 2017, using census data and cycle journey planning tools, researchers from the universities of Leeds and Westminster developed the Propensity to Cycle Tool. They calculated a Dutch-style network of genuinely quiet roads and traffic-free paths could raise current cycling levels by five times their current 2%. With widespread e-cycle availability, it’s 17% – more than one in six. Across England, with both a network of safe cycle routes and widespread ebike availability, one in four commutes could be done by cycling.
• the idea of cycling across Cornwall in a dress seems delightfully whimsical.
• the case for roadbuilding is based on a flawed understanding of what happens when you widen roads. Increasing road capacity, it turns out, generates more car trips, first by making it easier to drive and secondly by squeezing out other options – surrounding roads get busier as more people drive, and cycling and walking feel increasingly dangerous. Add that to declining investment in public transport and you are left with few other options. This long-understood phenomenon is known as induced demand. It’s the same with new cycle routes: more and better increase cycle journeys. Ultimately, you get the users you build routes for.
• Traffic engineers talk about something called design speed: how fast a road or route allows you to safely travel. These little lanes, which terrify American tourists, come with an optimistic default 60mph speed limit. While people take this as a target, the measured design speed can be far, far lower. Two drivers travelling at 60mph in opposite directions have a combined speed of 120mph, requiring a stopping distance of 400m – which means you need to see each other long before you both slam on the brakes. British lanes rarely allow for that kind of long view. In reality, engineers tell me, some of our most eccentric little lanes come with a design speed of more like 7mph.
• Residents have told the council they want lower speed limits because they can’t walk to the shops, ride horses or cycle in safety when there’s fast traffic about, and because they want rid of the noise from speeding drivers.
• Outside Chester station, Chris rides three sides of a long rectangle, the taxi drop-off route, to pull up at the kerb in front of me. When I chuckle, he says in explanation, ‘A single photo of me cycling the wrong way or on the pavement and I’d get Daily Mailed.’ A cycling gotcha is like catnip for some publications.
• One pressing crisis is the cost of living, and cycling and walking are incredibly cost-effective – if there were safe routes, households could give up one or more vehicle. Each car we own, Chris points out, costs us roughly the same as a family holiday, every year. I know which I’d rather spend my money on.
• In 2020, during the pandemic, councils up and down the country introduced planters on streets to prevent through-running traffic and enable social-distancing while people got out to exercise. While all addresses in LTNs are still accessible by car, reaching them might require a slightly longer drive. The idea is that by making cycling and walking more direct than driving you reduce short car trips and improve safety – and it seems to have worked. According to Lambeth Council, traffic on streets within the Streatham LTN decreased by 54%, while increasing 13% on boundary roads. It was a net reduction of 5% or 6100 vehicles in the area each day. The measures are now permanent.
• Wheels for Wellbeing campaigns for disabled cyclists, both those who already cycle, those who would like to and those who don’t even know cycling is an option. As well as producing reports and research with national and international reach, the charity’s inclusive cycling hubs in south London loan out non-standard cycles so people can experience cycling for themselves and learn which cycle works for them. The charity’s national survey, published in 2021, found that for 64% of disabled cyclists cycling is easier than walking – and for 59% their cycle is their mobility aid. Of 245 survey respondents more than half (60%) used standard bicycles, 26% tricycles or recumbents, 16.6% cycles and 8.53% tandems. The challenge is to ensure the environment enables people to cycle, however they do it. ‘Cyclists dismount’ signs, steps, barriers and chicanes all hamper people like Isabelle.
• The benefits of access to nature and physical exercise extend to everyone, and the mental health benefits are huge: research shows physical activity can cut depression rates by 30%. Cycling can also be a low-stress transport option, in the right circumstances. Isabelle says, ‘For some people in the middle of a mental health issue getting about can be stressful, but I’ve heard from people living with mental health issues who find they do not use public transport because that’s so stressful, but they get on their cycle: they are in control, they are not around other people, they can really get in the zone. That does amazing stuff for your soul.’
• Subjectively, drivers seemed more aggressive towards cyclists following lockdowns and speeding rates increased dramatically on quieter roads – which disabled cyclists found particularly off-putting.
• Unable to find the data himself, he wrote to schools across Wales to find out two thirds of primary children lived within a three-mile catchment area – or walking and cycling distance – making the case for better facilities enabling them to travel actively.
• By 2019 the more than 100 miles of superhighways were carrying 248,500 miles of cycling journeys a day, with a single weekday peak of 29,000 cyclists. Half of users are women and 14% previously used a car. What’s more, cycling trips were surprisingly competitive over longer distances: analysis measured journey times along one seven-mile section of route, representing the average cycle superhighway trip length, and found ebike trips were just five minutes slower than driving and regular cycle trips 12 minutes slower.
• Holidaymakers said after trying ebikes that they were tempted to buy one when they returned home. However, even though they’re far cheaper than a car, the cost is still daunting and, unlike in Europe, there are no purchase subsidies to help people switch to ebikes. According to a 2019 analysis, an ebike grant in the UK could be more than twice as effective at cutting CO2, per pound spent, as existing electric car grants. In France, ebike grants had a massive impact, increasing how much recipients cycled each year on average by seven times, from 200km to 1400km. People reduced their driving distances by 660km and CO2 output by 200kg each. Almost a third of users said they wouldn’t have bought an ebike without the grant. It also made cycling more equitable: while men make most cycling trips in France, ebike take-up was almost gender-equal (48% of grant beneficiaries were women).
• The Celtic countries seem to be winning the human-powered transport race as I see it and Glasgow, like Cardiff, is at the pointy end. In 2018 the Scottish government doubled its active travel spending to £80 million. The plan is that by 2024 10% of Scotland’s devolved transport spend will go to cycling and walking, not just in cities but in rural areas. There’s also, rather boldly, the target to cut car journeys by 20% by 2030.
• a Beithir, a mythological Scottish creature. Described as ‘the largest and most deadly kind of serpent’, it’s a water-dwelling dragon with a sting that could kill you unless you reach a body of water, say a canal, in time.
• A reminder that Scotland is investing more than any other UK nation in cycling: £58 per person per year, versus £1 a year in England, £28 in Wales and around £7 in Northern Ireland.
• women are less willing to share with traffic, or to use circuitous backstreet routes that introduce long detours. They need direct, safe routes. Because we don’t have many of those in the UK, for every one woman cycling there are currently three men. The pandemic quite suddenly emptied the roads of traffic and, hey presto, people got on their bikes in droves. One group the quiet roads and new safe cycle routes benefited was women – around the world the proportions of women cycling grew in response to a drop in traffic and billions of pounds’ investment in cycling.
• When we rediscover it, we wonder why we ever lost it – this gift of freedom, this very pure joy that exists atop a bicycle. It’s one the car industry promises, with its slick and ever-present advertising, beguilingly comfortable cockpits and easy access to power, but, on freedom and joy, cars rarely deliver. The bicycle, humble in essence with, for the most part, few frills and gadgets, does the opposite: it delivers freedom and exhilaration by the armful, even on a gentle potter through the neighbourhood
• These aren’t necessarily cyclists, per se – people who define themselves using the bicycle – they are people who happen to use bikes to get somewhere, to access the city.
• For many of these journeys a motor vehicle, with all the expense and inconvenience of parking, isn’t the tool we need, it’s just the only one we happen to have. It wouldn’t take a lot to give ourselves other options; it’s actually very simple, even if it’s not necessarily easy.
• While most of us are careful behind the wheel, plenty aren’t – with devastating consequences. A good network will design out most of the danger, but not all. Take the worst drivers off the road for good; introduce graded licensing for young drivers and use lifetime bans where appropriate. Speed limiting technology exists – we just need to deploy it and remove the ‘exceptional hardship’ clause that lets so many dangerous drivers off the hook.