Murnaghan Interview with Chris Boardman, British Cycling Policy Advisor, 3.04.16
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, last week the government launched its strategy to get Britain walking and cycling more but it has already been warned that the plan won’t be worth the paper it’s written on without sustained further funding. Well I spoke to Chris Boardman, the Olympic Champion and now policy advisor for British Cycling and I started by asking him if he thought the promised money, some £316 million, was a strong enough commitment from the government.
CHRIS BOARDMAN: It sounds like an awful lot of money doesn’t it but if you put it into context I’m afraid it isn’t. There are £61 billion being committed to infrastructure development in the UK, £15 billion for the strategic road network, that’s the largest investment in a generation so suddenly that 300 million quid doesn’t sound like an awful lot and it really isn’t. It’s half the price that it costs to refurbish one Tube station in London which I think really puts it into context and to put it further into context it’s about £1.43 per head in the UK whereas in the Netherlands and in Denmark, places we’re aspiring to be like, they are spending regularly ongoing £25 a year per person.
DM: So do you seriously think the government should be spending ten, twenty times as much?
CHRIS BOARDMAN: Well I’m a practical person to be honest, so I don’t like just firing and sniping away at people but I can’t help with think thinking it’s derisory, it’s insulting to our intelligence that this is dressed up as investment in cycling. I mean it’s a massive cut from what we’ve had before. David Cameron two years ago said I want to see a cycling revolution in Great Britain, I want us to be able to challenge any of our European neighbours – well you are not going to do that on £1.43 a head and he knows that. I think really you have just got to own up, are you saying that you don’t want to do this or are you telling lies because it’s one or the other.
DM: People will say, you know, we all know how wedded so many people are in the UK to their cars, he will say not very many people cycle at the moment, we’re making it a bit easier for those that want to do it to take it up but you can’t spend this huge amount of money on cycle ways and things like that, that no one’s going to use.
CHRIS BOARDMAN: Well they are very valid arguments and ones that we have to address for sure. The problem with cyclists is the road space right now, although it is statistically quite safe, it doesn’t look it, it doesn’t feel it, it doesn’t encourage people to change their behaviour and that’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about what you and I would consider a cyclist now, a stereotypical person in Lycra with high-viz and helmets who get out there and just get on with it, those people have already made their choice. The people we want to ride a bike are normal people in normal clothes doing normal things and they simply will not do that until there is safe space to do so. The evidence is all around us, it’s as far as away as we just mentioned in the Netherlands where 50% of school children ride to school on average, 50%, which is something I’m sure all parents here would like but even in Cambridge, we’ve already got it in Cambridge where the whole society has invested in more sustainable and more pleasant forms of transport, their cycling journeys are over 30% so it’s totally doable but you have to make the space first.
DM: Do you think it takes more than that to get people to cycle? We know about the health benefits, the environmental benefits but people still don’t seem to be getting that message so does this ‘build it and they will come’ strategy, if I can term it in terms of infrastructure, but does it need some compulsion as well?
CHRIS BOARDMAN: The infrastructure is if you like the kind of foundation on which everything else is built and without a foundation you can’t really go much further but to supplement that, if you had the commitment, the political will to put that in place, it is the most cost effective form of transport that you can possibly invest in, it pays back at 20 to 1 as opposed to roads which are at a one to one ratio and once you’ve got that, there are lots of other things. You need to put showers in in work places, easy places for people to park a bike, you need to incentivise people and also change the legislation on the road as well to actually protect and encourage the more vulnerable road users, all these things have been done all around us on the continent already and are proven to work. It would make a nicer society and there is no reason not to do it. In fact, to be honest, we shouldn’t have to be putting the case to do something that is backed by logic, no matter what battleground you want to choose. It should actually be for other people to have to make a case for why aren’t we.
DM: Okay but let’s just push some of those points, you talk about incentivising people at work places, putting in showers and bike parking but what about also taking away parking places, doing that as well as happens in some cases with new housing development, no parking place.
CHRIS BOARDMAN: Well I think you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head really, what this is all about. Right now we have developed a car culture, I’ve got two cars and I do about 25,000 miles a year so I don’t classify myself as a cyclist as a species, I’m a person, I use different modes of transport and by and large, I do what everyone else does, I’m going to do the easiest thing for me. If we are going to make cycling and walking the more desirable forms of transport, the easiest solutions, in some cases that will mean taking space away because there is a finite amount of space in a lot of our towns and cities, taking it away from one mode of transport and giving it to somebody else and that means there is going to be short term disruption and that’s something that really scares politicians. They like it the way it is now, even though they know it is not sustainable or logical, so that’s the next big step and that is why it requires political leadership and real courage to make these changes. So doing things like taking away some parking space and making it available for bike parking, taking away space from the roads to give it to cyclists and for walkers as well, those things aren’t necessarily going to be short term popular but I can almost guarantee you – again from evidence around Europe – that if you do them people will try and fight you tooth and nail if you try to take it away a couple of years later.
DM: You also mentioned, which I suspect will be very controversial, a change in the law. Are you hinting at this legal position which, and I’ll paraphrase it, if a cyclist is involved in an accident with a motorised vehicle, the presumption of fault is on the side of the motorised vehicle?
CHRIS BOARDMAN: It is very widely misunderstood and in a lot of cases on purpose it’s been badly twisted. Presumed liability, we almost have it actually, it’s in the Highway Code and it’s buried but it’s not explicit, it’s been ignored for so long that we’ve forgotten about it but presumed liability basically puts the onus on every person using our streets to look after the more vulnerable road user. So for example, if a cyclist hits a pedestrian then they would for insurance purposes, they would be liable unless they could prove otherwise. If a care is in an accident with a bike then it is the car insurance that pays unless they can prove otherwise. It’s not a legal term, you don’t get points or fines because of it, but it just makes everybody look after the more vulnerable road user.
DM: Chris Boardman there on British Cycling policy.
