Effective networks of cycle tracks encourage a much larger section
of the
population to cycle than we generally see on two wheels in the UK.

Evidence? Edinburgh spent large sums and the number of utility
cyclists apparently dropped.


Forty minutes from London's Kings Cross is Stevenage, the town that
taught the Dutch how to do bike paths. You don't have to read
foreign papers, just go and look. It was Stevenage's chief engineer,
Eric Claxton, touring the world, talking about Stevenage, that led to
the idea that you could build bike path systems in towns, at least if
you built the path system first, and then built the town round it.

I don't know what the bike modal split is in Stevenage nowadays.
They don't seem to like to talk about it.

Further up the same line is Cambridge, where the bike facilities are
few, crummy, and were installed only two thirds of a century after
the bikes arrived. Cambridge has a higher proportion of cyclists
than Amsterdam.

Jeremy Parker