The latest instalment of our series, in which we use the Centre for Cities’ data tools to crunch some of the numbers on Britain’s cities.
Round here, we are broadly speaking in favour of making cities more liveable, and broadly speaking against filling them with horrible, choking, lifespan-cutting gases like Nitrogen Dioxide. So, on balance, we’re pro-cycling.
It’s reassuring, then, that between the last two censuses, the number of people commuting by bike climbed in most of Britain’s major cities. It’s less reassuring, however, that we’re starting from such a low-base – and also that we have to say “most”, rather than “all”.
But we’ll get to that: first, define your cities. There are 63 cities in the Centre for Cities database – but this includes such metropolises as Blackpool and Aldershot. To make the dataset more user-friendly, we’ve decided to create a new category of “major cities”: London; the 10 cities in the “Core Cities” group; plus the other two national capitals, Edinburgh and Belfast.
Here’s how the percentage of people commuting by bike in those 13 cities changed between the 2001 and 2011 censuses.
The first thing to note is how low the numbers here are: in every city, it’s a tiny minority of people who use pedal power to get to work. Boo.
Within that, though, there’s a pretty clear division between cities where the figures are low, and those where they are really low. In eight of them, they’re jostling around the 1-2 per cent mark. But four cities – Nottingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast – are rather higher (3-6 per cent, say) suggesting that they’re more cycling friendly.
Mathematicians among you will have noticed that’s only 12 cities. The 13th is London, which saw a quite significant increase between the two censuses. In 2001, just 2.3 per cent of Londoners cycled to work, placing it just above the low-cycling group; a decade later, that number had jumped to 3.6, putting it securely in the higher-cycling one. Those numbers are still small, and anecdote isn’t data of course, but experience of the capital’s streets suggests to me it will have climbed further in the mean time.
Another city has seen an even more marked increase, and from a higher starting point. That’s Bristol, right at the top of the chart, up from 3.9 to 6.1 per cent. It’s tempting to credit this to the London-ification of the city, as creative hipster types have been forced out of the capital by house prices – but since nearly 4 per cent of Bristolians were already cycling in 2001 it’s probably it’s just a relatively good city for cycling. Good for Bristol.
Anyway. The general story here is of steady increases: in 11 of the cities, more people commuted by bike in 2011 than a decade earlier. The trend is very clearly towards more cycling.
In the last two, however, that number has fallen. In Birmingham it’s fallen very slightly from 1.65 to 1.53 per cent; in Nottingham, very slightly more, from 3.58 to 3.27 per cent.
These are small changes, of course: the larger fall is of 0.3 per cent. Big woop. But it is striking that they go against a trend towards more cycling, and it’s not immediately obvious why that should be.
That said, the trend in the two cities does appear to be different. Over the same period, Nottingham has seen a slightly increase in the proportion of workers commuting by public transport (0.4 per cent) and a slightly bigger fall in those driving (1.25 per cent). So even though cycling numbers are slightly down, the trend is still towards a less car-based city.
My instinct was to credit all this to Nottingham’s tram network – but Bimingham also has one of those, and there things have gone, slightly, in the other direction. Car use is up (0.6 per cent); public transport use is down (0.3 per cent).
These are still, remember, tiny figures: proper margin of error stuff. But nonetheless, at a time when the trend is towards less car-based cities, even standing still looks bad.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and also has a Facebook page now for some reason.
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