London’s roads to give space for new cycle lanes

The Mayor of London and TfL have unveiled their ‘London Streetspace’ programme which will rapidly transform London’s streets to accommodate a possible ten-fold increase in cycling and five-fold increase in walking when lockdown restrictions are eased.

With London’s public transport capacity potentially running at a fifth of pre-crisis levels, millions of journeys a day will need to be made by other means. If people switch only a fraction of these journeys to cars, London risks grinding to a halt, air quality will worsen, and road danger will increase.

To prevent this happening, Sadiq Khan announced that TfL will rapidly repurpose London’s streets to serve this unprecedented demand for walking and cycling in a major new strategic shift. Early modelling by the organisation has revealed there could be more than a 10-fold increase in kilometres cycled, and up to five times the amount of walking, compared to pre-coronavirus levels, if demand returns.

The move will focus primarily on three areas: the rapid construction of a strategic cycling network; a complete transformation of local town centres to enable local journeys to be safely walked and cycled where possible; and reducing traffic on residential streets.

Khan said: “The capacity of our public transport will be dramatically reduced post-coronavirus as a result of the huge challenges we face around social distancing. Everyone who can work from home must continue to do so for some time to come. The emergency measures included in our major strategic London Streetspace programme will help those who have to travel to work by fast-tracking the transformation of streets across our city. Many Londoners have rediscovered the joys of walking and cycling during lockdown and, by quickly and cheaply widening pavements, creating temporary cycle lanes and closing roads to through traffic we will enable millions more people to change the way they get around our city.

“I urge the government and boroughs to work with us to enable Londoners to switch to cleaner, more sustainable forms of transport - and reduce the pressure on other parts of our transport network – once the lockdown is eased.”