Like the commercial e-bikes for hire on the streets of Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast, London’s e-bikes are available for anyone to hire for journeys across the city.

The 2000 bikes are available at docking stations around London, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Transport for London says more than 750,000 e-bike trips have been taken since it offered the scheme in 2022.

The move is part of Mayor Sadiq Khan’s vision of “making active travel around the city as accessible as possible”. 

The expansion of the public e-bike fleet will be complemented by a new pricing structure, which will make it cheaper to use the scheme.

Transport for London is introducing a new £3 ($5.80) day pass that allows for unlimited journeys of 30 minutes or less all day. Longer trips will cost users an additional £1 (A$1.90) per half hour.

E-bike users in Australia pay $1 to unlock a bike and up to 54 cents a minute, costing around $17 for a 30-minute journey.

London’s initiative also comes in the midst of a bike boom in the city, where the number of trips completed by bike is increasing substantially.

“The e-bikes have proved hugely popular since they were introduced and help break down the barriers that stop some people from cycling,” says Khan. “The new day pass rate will also make Santander bikes one of the most affordable ways to travel in the capital.”

Transport for London has attributed this uptick in bike riding to the continued investment in infrastructure.

The city’s strategic cycle network has expanded from 90km in 2016 to 352km  today. Meanwhile, the proportion of Londoners living within 400 metres of the network has ballooned from an estimated 5% in 2016 to almost 25%.

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In a four-year program that runs until 2027, the government has pledged to double the national bike lane network by 2030 at a cost of $2.4 billion.

The program will increase the country’s bike lane network from 50,000km to 80,000km by 2027 and 100,000km by 2030. Priority will be given to provincial cities and rural areas, as big cities have already received considerable state funding for cycling infrastructure.

An additional $160 million will be made available to less populated regions for long-term development of bike infrastructure.

The government has boosted its programs to aid the purchase of new bikes.

It will increase its electric bike ecological bonus from $321 to a maximum of $650 and its cargo bike ecological bonus to a maximum of $3200 for the purchase of a cargo bike, an electric bike trailer, a folding bike or a bike adapted for disability use.

A bonus of $240 is available for the purchase of non-electric bikes.

A $4800 incentive will be offered to motorists who convert to an e-bike or cargo bike and dispose of their cars.

Tax concessions will be offered to businesses that use cargo bikes to transport goods. The nation also will develop a national bicycle tourism strategy and spend $160 million to develop a bike reconditioning and recycling sector for the second-hand bike market.

The government will also increase spending on bike parking facilities in railway stations and in cities, boost spending on anti-theft bike marking and provide bike training for all primary schoolchildren.

(All figures are in Australian dollars)

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It is the country’s first Dutch-style roundabout, a protected intersection design popularised in the Netherlands and beginning to appear around the globe.

The roundabout is in the outer Dublin suburb of Mulhuddart and is part of a development called Church Fields being built to promote active travel.

“We are creating a network of roads, cycle lanes and footpaths that will manage the flow of people around Church Fields,” says Fingal County Council’s Director of Planning and Strategic Infrastructure Matthew McAleese. “The area has a young population. It is just beginning to develop, and we have a golden moment now to make it as safe and attractive as possible.”

On the face of it, any infrastructure that separates and protects bike riders and pedestrians is welcome infrastructure, but safety improvements aren’t always immediate and clear cut. 

A Dutch roundabout introduced in Cambridge in 2020, the UK’s first, serves as a useful example.

With zebra crossings, a dedicated outer ring for bike riders and “sharks’ teeth” markings to indicate right of way, Cambridge’s Dutch roundabout is a similar design to the one in Mulhuddart.

In the three years since it was introduced, there have been 10 collisions, three of them serious, according to council figures reported by the BBC in April. This is an increase on the six minor incidents reported at the intersection between 2017 and 2019.

However, the council reasons that the number of bike riders using the roundabout has increased by almost 50% since 2017 and now makes up 11.4% of all traffic users in 2022. Pedestrian use increased by around 30% over the same time.

Closer to home, this style of intersection has been introduced in Melbourne and in Canberra it may just become the norm. The ACT Government last month released a draft guide for best-practice intersection design featuring protective barriers and continuous bike paths at roundabouts, with a view to making them standard on the city’s streets.

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The city is undertaking a new revitalisation project, rather than resting on its laurels, and will turn a notorious route for bikes into a low-traffic street prioritising walking, riding and public transport.

De Pijp, a neighbourhood on the southern edge of Amsterdam’s CBD and Van Woustraat, serves as a main thoroughfare and winds through the area as a lively shopping strip and key access point to the city.

It’s also considered the city’s worst place to ride a bike, viewed as an lingering relic of urban Amsterdam in the 1970s and ’80s before the city began its renowned transformation.

While many of Amsterdam’s main roads have been overhauled to become more amenable to bike riding and walking, Van Woustraat has gone unchanged.

But work is underway on refurbishing its busy and narrow northern section, an area that covers five blocks and leads to the fringe of the downtown area. This renewed section of Van Woustraat will be reinvented as a low-traffic city street. 

On-street car parking will be removed and wider footpaths and bike lanes will take their place. The design also incorporates loading and unloading bays for deliveries.

The project involves the redesign of nearby intersections to improve the flow of bikes and prevent cut-through motor traffic in the interests of rider and pedestrian safety. 

The Amsterdam city council approved a concept plan in 2019 and began work on the project in May. The plan will be completed in phases and is expected to be wrapped up by the second quarter of 2024.

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A total of 291 riders died on the roads last year, the highest for the 27 years since records have been kept.

This was 84 more than in 2021.

In 2022, a total of 737 people in the Netherlands were killed in traffic collisions, 27% up on 2021, and the highest since 2008.

Remarkably, more than half of the road deaths among cyclists were 75 years of age or older. And 85% were aged over 50.

The figure of 150 deaths of riders aged over 75 was an increase of 84 over the previous year.

The data was released by Netherlands Statistics.

Almost half of the number of bicycle deaths (141) occurred after a collision with a car or van.

In a quarter of fatal bicycle accidents, there was no collision with a vehicle or an object, rather riders had died after falling or slipping.

Figures from the Dutch Safety Bureau show that cycling injuries have risen steadily, with a 40% increase over the last 10 years, although there was a significant drop during COVID.

In 2022 a total of 88,000 riders ended up in a hospital emergency department and made up 66% of all road crash victims.

About 25% of riders admitted to emergency departments had a brain injury.

The surge in casualties has sparked debate in the country.

The local cycling organisation, Fietsersbond, has called for more spacious bike facilities, and infrastructure adaption for older riders such as oblique rather than vertical kerbs.

The Foundation for Scientific Research on Road Safety in the Netherlands has stated that the most effective measures to reduce the toll were safer cycling infrastructure; reduction of the speed limit from 50 to 30 km/h in built-up areas, and the use of the bicycle helmets.

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Savoir rouler à vélo (Know how to bike) was launched in 2018 as part of the French government’s Plan Vélo, a National Cycling and Active Mobility Plan.

This massive €350 million plan for bikes included funding not just for new lanes and infrastructure (of which there is plenty), but the objective of making bike riding accessible to everyone from an early age.

The Savoir rouler à vélo (SRAV) program is geared towards children aged six to 11, working with schools to provide primary school students with 10 hours of lessons to get them on bikes.

Fundamentals such pedalling, braking and balance, how to navigate as part of a group and communication skills will be the first part of the program. From there, children will progress to riding on-road and learning how to get around independently.

The idea is that by the time children in France enter middle school, they are well-versed in the art of two-wheeled travel. In the four years after it was introduced, SRAV trained some 160,000 primary school children to ride a bike.

By prioritising neighbourhoods with high rates of unemployment, social housing, and limited access to public transit, SRAV is also introducing bikes to children who otherwise might not encounter them until later in life.

According to Next City, around 20% of students trained through SRAV have come from priority neighborhood districts.

In an update late last year, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne committed a further €250 million to new bike paths and parking, and outlined the ambition of expanding the bike education program to train an entire age group, more than 800,000 children a year, by 2027.

There are some parallels between SRAV and Bicycle Network’s Ride2School program, which gets children into the habit of bike riding through education sessions and initiatives like Open Streets.

National Ride2School day is Australia’s biggest celebration of active transport, and earlier this year, a record-breaking 500 Victoria schools took part.

While supported by the Victorian and Tasmanian governments, Bicycle Network’s Ride2School program is limited by its funding and has no backing from the Federal
Government.

The forward-thinking French program is an example of an ambitious national plan to encourage kids to be physically active, and a big-picture approach to making bikes central to mobility into the future.

More information on Bicycle Network’s Ride2School program is available here.

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Andrew Crompton didn’t consider himself a keen bike rider when setting out from his hometown in the UK with a 13,000-km-plus journey in front of him.

But with 10,000 km now on the odometer and only a final stretch down Australia’s east coast in front of him, the British businessman’s spirits remain high.

“Motivation levels are good, the finish line feels not too far away,” Crompton said, having touched down in Cairns on Australia Day.

Crompton left the town of Bolton in Greater Manchester in early August with the aim of riding all the way to Melbourne to raise funds for young children in caring roles back home.

The trip would take him across 3 continents, 18 countries, and involve many twists and turns.

Among them were encounters with wild dogs in the mountains of Turkey, which would chase his bike and sneak up on him whenever he stopped, demanding his constant alertness.

Irregular road surfaces in India threw up another kind of challenge, causing the bike to “nearly fall apart.”

Crompton said he and his support team had to do several checks a day to make sure everything was in working order.

It was during this leg that an unmarked speed bump knocked Crompton off his bike in what was the worst fall of the trip so far.

And smoother surfaces would prove testing in their own way. The straight, never-ending roads running through the desert of Saudi Arabia offered no discernible landmarks and therefore few ways for Crompton to get a sense of his progress.

Strong and sandy headwinds combined with 40°C temperatures to add insult to injury during this mind-numbing and mentally challenging leg.

Crompton is now enroute to Melbourne with around 3,000 km left to pedal, with hopes of crossing the finish line on the banks of the Yarra River on 25 March 2022, all going to plan.

In doing so, he will raise important funds for Carers Trust and Bolton Lads and Girls Club that support young carers in the UK, with more than £250,000 raised at the time of writing.

You can follow Crompton’s journey on Instagram or over at his website. 

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Indeed, those fishing for bicycles in Amsterdam yank more than 12,000 of them out of the city’s canals each year. And their presence is problematic at street level too, particularly around Amsterdam Central Station where people pedal in from all directions and squeeze their bikes into cluttered racks by the thousands.

But a state-of-the-art facility has now swung open its doors, offering the people of Amsterdam a safe and streamlined way to secure their bikes.

Credit: Dutch Cycling Embassy

Twelve years in the making, the station’s freshly-finished Stationsplein bike garage is the largest in Amsterdam and sits underneath the water between the station’s island and Prins Hendrikkade, one of the city’s major streeets. Construction began in 2018 and involved first pumping water from the basin in order to lay the floor for the expansive new garage.

Credit: City of Amsterdam

The €50 million (A$77 million) effort culminated in a long-awaited opening on Saturday 28 January 2023, with visitors now able to make use of 7,000 spaces on offer.

Access is gained with a Dutch public transport smart card or a newer system that uses bicycle tags for automatic recognition, allowing for smoother entry and exit.

Once inside, green lights are used to indicate availability of spaces, while panoramic artwork depicting the history of Amsterdam decorates the walls. The first 24 hours of parking are free, after which a daily rate of €1.35 (A$2.08) applies. A bike servicing area is on site if visitors are in need of a tune-up.

Een kijkje in de nieuwe (en grootste) fietsenstalling van onze stad! Deze is vandaag geopend en ligt aan de centrumkant van het Centraal Station.

In totaal is hier ruimte voor 7.000 fietsen.

Op 28 januari vieren we de vernieuwing van het Stationseiland. Ben jij er bij? pic.twitter.com/HIvJ9NelTf

— Gemeente Amsterdam (@AmsterdamNL) January 25, 2023

And those unable to find a spot at Stationsplein will soon have another option to turn to. Nearby, an underground bike garage called IJboulevard is nearing completion behind the station, which will offer space for 4,000 further bicycles once it opens in February.

Together, these underwater bike garages will create more space for pedestrians around Amsterdam Central Station, with street-level racks to be removed in the coming weeks. This is part of a broader strategy by the city to restore the station to its former glory of circa 1900, with easy access and pleasant, open surroundings.

You can hear from the City of Amsterdam’s Pieter Visser, project manager for the Stationsplein bike garage, in the video from the Dutch Cycling Embassy below.

Lead image supplied by Dutch Cycling Embassy.

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