Even on a wet, cold November night, London’s flagship cycle superhighway along the Embankment is thronged. Across the whole 24 hours, it is used by 10,329 cyclists, an average of seven a minute. But at this time of day, it is one every three seconds. In the rush hour, the bike track – which takes up one lane of this four-lane road – carries more traffic than the other three lanes put together.
It’s an extraordinary success, and it looks like a permanent fixture. But it might not be. Behind the scenes, a powerful property company, Canary Wharf Group, is working with a political lobbying firm and major road organisations on a campaign to get it ripped out.
My antennae started twitching when I noticed a mysterious new organisation called Unblock the Embankment, a “group of businesses and road users” calling for a “sensible re-route” of the superhighway. Its website gives no names or contact details, but I immediately thought back to 2014, when I was London’s cycling commissioner, one of those responsible for getting the thing built in the first place.
Canary Wharf opposed it then, too – but not, for a long time, in the open. They knew it was too popular. Instead they ferociously lobbied everyone they could think of, and hired PRs to try to kill it off behind the public’s backs. They failed, but now the “old men in limos,” as Chris Boardman called them, are back for another go.
Unblock The Embankment, it turns out, is run by the lobbying firm Newington Communications. Its co-ordinator, Newington’s Tony Halmos, told me that the clients are Canary Wharf, the only major business, along with the London Chamber of Commerce, the Road Haulage Association, the Confederation of Passenger Transport, which represents coach operators, and the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association, among others. Canary Wharf did not respond to a request for comment.
The campaign has a low public profile because, as in 2014, it is not really aimed at the public. It would probably lose any battle fought in the open: 84% of Londoners supported the superhighway in the consultation, 64% backed it in an independent YouGov opinion poll and City businesses, Canary Wharf apart, came out overwhelmingly in favour. So instead Newington, which has close links with London government, has spent the last two months quietly meeting people at City Hall and Transport for London, which built the superhighway and which owns the roads it runs on.
It’s not clear how much progress they’ve made. But TfL is another of Newington’s clients, though not for this. And Halmos was head of PR for the City of London Corporation – which also made difficulties over the superhighway back in 2014, and is now planning traffic restrictions in its core area that could drive more vehicles onto the superhighway route. Halmos says the City “might end up” supporting his campaign. The City said it did not support it and the traffic proposals it had made were “in addition to the existing cycle superhighways.”
If the City’s position needs to be watched carefully, more reassuring is that Unblock the Embankment simply hasn’t thought its case through. Halmos insists it actually wants to keep the segregated cycle route on the Embankment bit itself, and scrap only the eastern end of the track, between Blackfriars and Tower Hill.
This is strange – not just because of the campaign’s name, but because removing the track over only half its length would do little or nothing to increase the road’s capacity for motors. East of Blackfriars, Halmos is proposing an alternative route for cyclists through the City that would still dump them back on to Tower Hill, the tightest pinchpoint on the whole route. He said he had evidence that this would relieve congestion, but did not provide it when asked.
We went through all these options in my time and dismissed them, mainly because they don’t work but also because the City Corporation would never allow segregation on its roads. Cannon Street and Eastcheap may become lower-traffic in the future. But unlike the superhighway, they will not be traffic-free, or anything near it.
Roads’ job is to move people, not motor vehicles – and thanks to the superhighway, the Embankment is moving more people than ever. Even if you took out the whole track and threw cyclists back in with the lorries, that would create room for perhaps 200 extra vehicles an hour on three or so miles of road – before it all ground to a halt anyway as new traffic was drawn to the extra space. Compared with the 3,000 bike-an-hour capacity of the cycle lane, it seems like a fairly bad deal. I always thought that to work in the City, you had to be able to count.
On which subject, Unblock The Embankment has claimed the cycle track costs businesses £5.3m a year. This figure considers only the claimed disbenefits to motorists and ignoring all the safety, travel time and health benefits to cyclists, presumably on the grounds that they don’t matter.
However, the figure is surely an own goal: the £5.3m figure is just over 0.001% of a London economy worth £430bn a year.
Halmos also claims that the superhighway has caused “more pollution,” a canard that has been disproved time and again. When I asked for the evidence, he said: “We’re doing some air quality work, but it’s hardly started yet.”
Sadiq Khan shouldn’t find it too hard to resist these flaky efforts. But it’s barely believable that serious figures are spending time to destroy even the tiny steps London’s made to becoming a more human city – and still think the future of transport can be more people driving cars and vans.
• Andrew Gilligan was London’s cycling commissioner from 2013-16
