Going Green

We have to go green, fast

Will more bicycles really help green growth?

The difficulty of making money out of cycling could hamper its rise

Like many other people, I began commuting by bike in the past few months, too soon to even to show up in official stats.

I bought an excellent new bike, two locks and a helmet for about £260 total. That’s about 1 per cent of the average price of a new car in the UK, and I will never need petrol.

Bicycle repairs rarely cost much, and if my bike isn’t stolen, nobody will earn another cent out of my urban transport for another decade or so. That’s wonderful — but the difficulty of making money out of cycling could hamper its growth.

Bikes are green, clean, healthy and take up less space than cars, but without a big industry behind them, they may be too cheap to thrive.

And if cycling does manage to grow, it will (certainly initially) decimate jobs and reduce gross domestic product. In short, the story of the bicycle is the myth of “green growth” in one device.

Europe’s dense cities were built for horses, so they proved perfectly adapted for bikes. In 1949 cycling accounted for more than 14 billion vehicle miles travelled in the UK. However, for the next 25 years, as driving spread widely, that figure shrank by about 20 percent.

go up to 16mph — will make cycling practical for most people living in suburban communities.

Cycling Industries Europe says that Historically, we talked about cycling as a 5km solution. Now we’re talking about it as a 15km solution. That is transformational.

For all the hype around electric cars, so far the more significant innovation is the eBike. About 3.3 million pedal-assisted eBikes were sold on the continent last year, or nearly six times the number of plug-in electric car sales, estimates the Confederation of the European Bicycle Industry (Conebi). And eBikes managed this without company-car subsidies and other tax breaks that prop up carmakers.

In many cities, bikes are now popping up everywhere the way cars did a century ago, albeit from a similarly tiny base. Walk (or cycle) around London, Paris or Barcelona and you will see bike lanes in places where you would never imagined them before.

Next month, there will be more. Lisbon just announced it is banning most cars from the city centre. In Seville, cycling has increased elevenfold in recent years, says Conebi. Biking keeps getting safer: Oslo (which aims to be carbon neutral by 2030) and Helsinki each recorded zero cyclist deaths last year. Remco Nijdam

Europe’s mighty car lobby is not trying to undermine urban cycling, say Mayne and Marsilio. It is too busy fighting bigger battles, notably surrounding the European Commission’s demand for more electric vehicles. The fiercest opponents of bikes in cities are motorists and small-business owners battling for their parking spaces.

But the car lobby will always out punch the bike lobby, mostly because cars cost more. Germany’s cycling industry in 2018 had revenues of a bit more than £5bn; the country’s car industry was 70 times bigger. (The figures for both sectors include makers of components.) Even a decent eBike costs only about £1,200, just 5 per cent of the price of a car.

“The problem with a bike is that it’s just too good,” says Ross Douglas, founder of the Parisian urban mobility summit Autonomy. “The technology does not change much, and they last for ever. The car industry is good at creating jobs, as they use about two tonnes of mass and a motor of up to 350hp to move an 80kg occupant.”

Ominously for cycling and other green modes of transport, activities that can be monetised tend to get encouraged. There’s a cigarette industry and a gambling industry, but there isn’t a walking industry.

consequence, cities aren’t now building scooter lanes, leaving scooters to annoy pedestrians on pavements.

Carmakers employ millions of mostly blue-collar men, so governments care about them. In the UK, the fate of Nissan’s plant in Sunderland has become a central plot line of Brexit.

Conversely, the absence of serious Dutch and Danish car industries freed Amsterdam and Copenhagen to adopt mass cycling early, says Douglas.

The other danger of the rise of cycling: it may exacerbate the urban-rural divide that is already the bane of our politics.

While bikes proliferate in cities and inner suburbs, they are fading from the countryside, even in Denmark, notes Mayne, as older people move to villages and bring their cars with them.

In other words, the town person and the country person are each acquiring their own mode of transport. That could leave carmakers with a rural, ageing and generally poorer customer base.