Ever since Team GB’s velodrome successes at the 2008 Olympics, campaigners and government ministers have confidently predicted that Britain is about to become a nation of cyclists. There is just one problem: for the most part, it has not happened.
Apart from a very concentrated spike in bike use during Covid, the level of cycle trips in England has stayed broadly static for years, and things do not appear to be changing.
In December, Brompton reported the lowest annual sales of its eponymous folding bikes since 2021. Statistics from the Bicycle Association, the trade body for the bike industry in Britain, show that in 2024, fewer conventional bikes were bought than in any other year this century.
“If you look at the sales of pedal cycles since 2010, there isn’t a year except the Covid year when sales haven’t declined. I’m always puzzled that people in the industry aren’t more alarmed about that,” says Phillip Darnton, executive chair of the Bicycle Association.
It is, however, not a picture of unqualified gloom. London is experiencing a sustained cycling boom, now at nearly 1.5m trips a day, 43% higher than 2019. A handful of other places have seen increases in bike use, albeit less spectacularly.
Buried within this mix of statistics are a handful of apparent lessons. To find them, it helps first to think about the different types of cyclists on our roads.
Leisure riders – the fabled middle-aged pedallers snaking through the Surrey Hills or Peak District in DayGlo Lycra come rain or shine – can only ever be a small part of what makes a cycling nation.
Others include those who cycle every day for transport, and experts agree these people will only cycle if they feel it is safe, which requires long-term investment in infrastructure. Finally, with the advent of ebikes and dockless hire networks such as Lime, cycling is changing at speed – but some say the government is not, as yet, keeping pace.
Adam Tranter, who runs a PR agency that works with cycling brands and was formerly the walking and cycling commissioner for the West Midlands, points to the gradual shift in higher-end bike sales from traditional road bikes to so-called gravel bikes, designed to be ridden off-road, and to sophisticated indoor trainers, where people race against each other virtually.
“All this is a code for people saying, ‘I don’t like being near cars as I don’t feel safe’,” he says. “Whichever way you look at it, you can’t reach the potential of cycling without making it much more safe and hospitable to cycle. It all comes down to that basic fact.”
While Westminster governments have see-sawed between a relative enthusiasm for cycling under Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer to the transport culture wars and conspiracies of Rishi Sunak, in contrast, London has seen more than two decades of support under the mayoralties of Ken Livingstone, Johnson and then Sadiq Khan.
“For things to really change you need strong, consistent political leadership over a sustained period of time,” a senior figure in the cycle policy world says. “If you have consistent investment you can also attract and keep the talent and skills you need to make cycling work in somewhere as ancient and tightly packed as London. These people aren’t easy to find.”
London does, of course, also have a concentrated population and disincentives to driving, including the congestion charge and a network of low-traffic neighbourhoods in many boroughs.
As anyone who has been in London recently will know, as well as growing in size, the swarms of cyclists are also changing in type, including more people on electric-assist bikes, including hire versions such as the ubiquitous Lime models.
Within this are a distinct breed of machine: often startlingly rapid electric contraptions powered by vast rear-wheel hub motors and a collection of zip-tied batteries, many ridden by gig economy riders for delivery companies. These are not ebikes, which are strictly defined by law. They are in effect a form of electric motorbike, entirely illegal but rarely challenged by police.
“It’s a massive image problem for cycling because more or less everyone conflates the two things,” Tranter says. “You could tackle this more or less overnight by forcing delivery companies to make checks, for example monitoring riders’ speeds. But it seems we’d rather just moan about it.”
This new technological world means sales of conventional bikes are falling throughout Europe. The difference is that in many other countries, the balance is being made up by sales of legal ebikes.
Darnton says: “This year, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain will sell more than 5m electric bikes between them. We might be lucky if we sell 150,000 here.”
Much of this is down to other countries having safer road conditions for cycling, plus subsidies to help people buy sometimes expensive ebikes, the sort of scheme thus far only applied to electric cars and motorbikes in the UK.
But beyond this, ebikes have something of an image problem, something shaped by a mix of personal experience or media coverage.
Tranter says: “With hire bikes, the issue is mainly their sheer popularity – as numbers grow so does the number of idiots, like any other transport mode. But we have ended up with their popularity being seen as a problem to solve, not a huge success story for active mobility.”
Added to this is the near-unchecked use of illegal electric bikes, many made in China, which are often dangerously quick and, unlike legal models, can have alarmingly combustible batteries.
Darnton says: “People read that ebikes are dangerous and they believe it. And if your landlord says you can’t bring it on to the property, or your employer says you can’t park it in the underground car park, which is increasingly the case, then you won’t get one.
“In London, if you ask someone under about 35 if they are thinking of buying a bike they’ll say, ‘Why? I’ve got one at the end of the road.’
He adds: “Existential is this rather ghastly word, but it’s true: unless we can do what Europe does, what is going to happen to the UK cycle market is it’s going to be a leisure market, like golf or tennis or badminton or anything else.”
