Episode 147: Riding the UK’s Cycle Network with Laura Laker 

 

Doug Gordon: Spring is just around the corner, and that means bulbs poking out of the ground, buds on trees, a lot more daylight—and a whole lot of rain. You’ve heard us talk about why we love Cleverhood rain gear. Well, one of the biggest reasons is that it’s designed for all four seasons. After a cold, blustery winter when you could wear your Rover rain cape over a warm jacket, you can still keep wearing your Cleverhood through that typical March weather, when the temperature goes up, then it goes down, and then it’s accompanied by a sudden rainstorm. Just do what I do. Because the Rover takes up so little space, I stash it in my bike pannier or the bag I use when I’m walking around. As soon as the weather takes a turn, I’m good to go. No amount of rain can stop my ride or break my stride. Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15 percent on everything in the Cleverhood store now through the end of March. Just go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars and enter THERAINMARCH at checkout. Again, that’s code THERAINMARCH at Cleverhood.com/waroncars.

Laura Laker: We do have really dreadful pieces about cycling, and you never get the same with motor vehicle danger, with driver danger. There’s really very much a kind of pass given to dangerous behavior on the roads. You know, it’s getting worse. Police are saying that speeding is increasing. And, you know, if anyone talks about catching speeding drivers, someone in the media will say this is just an exercise to take money from drivers, and really ignoring the fact that speed is one of the biggest contributing factors to collisions and deaths on the roads.

Sarah Goodyear: Welcome to The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear, and I’m here in the studio with my co host, Doug Gordon.

Doug: Hey, everybody.

Sarah: How you doing?

Doug: Doing okay, you know, all things considered.

Sarah: [laughs] All things considered, yeah.

Doug: We’re here in the studio. That’s—that’s a lot. That’s good.

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Doug: Yes. And speaking of live events, we have our live show in Minneapolis on Thursday April 24. Tickets are still available for that. We are being brought out there by Our Streets, which is an amazing advocacy organization. So we will put a link in the show notes for tickets or for how you can donate to Our Streets. And we will see you in Minneapolis in April.

Sarah: Yeah. So our guest today is sitting in from the United Kingdom, and we are really, really excited to have her on. Laura Laker is a freelance journalist who specializes in cycling and urban transport. She has written for a variety of publications about the politics of active transportation, including the Guardian and Bloomberg City Lab. Last year, Laura published her first book. Congratulations!

Laura Laker: Thank you!

Sarah: Having just written a book, we know how hard that is. It’s called Potholes and Pavements: A Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network. And that is available from Bloomsbury. And it’s a really, really fun book, and we’re gonna talk about it. Laura also co-hosts her own podcast, which is called Streets Ahead with a couple of other folks. And in 2021, Laura led the team that put together the UK’s first road collision reporting guidelines, and those set out best practices for the media and professionals to talk about road crashes, their prevention and aftermath. Laura Laker, welcome to The War on Cars.

Laura Laker: Thank you. I’m very excited to be here.

Doug: We are very excited to have you.

Sarah: So let’s talk about your book, Potholes and Pavements. You spent a year riding the UK’s National Cycle Network, which is something that I didn’t even realize existed, to do the reporting for this. And you weave together your personal adventures on this 13,000-mile cycle network with a tremendous amount of information about the history of how it was built, the history of bicycle advocacy in Britain in general. And you also look at the political barriers and opportunities that cycling for transportation and leisure presents. So maybe you could start by describing the National Cycle Network and tell us what that is, because most of our listeners are not in the UK.

Laura Laker: Yeah. Well, you’re not alone. Even in the UK, only 26 percent of people have heard of the NCN, the National Cycle Network. And it’s one of those funny things. I mean, I remember taking an ex with me—he wasn’t my ex at the time—when I first was trying to pitch the idea of this book. And we went for a ride, and he had no idea about the NCN either. He’d sort of started cycling during the pandemic.

Laura Laker: And so we went for this ride to find the nearest section to me and, and we finally reached it, and it was kind of a crossing, a pedestrian crossing. And you had to sort of press the button like you do on any pedestrian crossing, and then sort of, you know, kind of waddle over to the button and then wait and then cycle over. And there’s a little blue sticker, and I took a photo because that was the first kind of sighting of the NCN during our adventures, what would become a sort of year-long adventure.

Laura Laker: And he was sort of looking at me and saying, “What are you taking a picture of?” And it’s kind of like Alice in Wonderland, you know, when she goes down the rabbit hole. And suddenly when you see these stickers, you realize actually this is a route that’s part of a network. But you could drive or walk or even cycle down the same street, the same neighborhood for years and never realize and never notice because it’s kind of stuck in the corners, and it’s a little bit—I mean, I described it as “parasitic” because quite often it’s not a cycle lane or a cycle route or anything that’s been designed for cycling. It’s like a bit of road, a bit of pavement that maybe was sort of suitable-ish, but then has never really been improved. And it’s got volunteers who kind of stick these stickers onto lampposts, and sometimes there’s money for signage, but it really is kind of random.

Laura Laker: But it’s also, as I realized through my adventures, through my exploration of the network, kind of a beautiful thing because it was really, you know, started by volunteers, by people who wanted safe cycling routes in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The government wasn’t building for that; they were doing roads for cars. And yeah, so they just thought, “Well, you know, let’s try and do something ourselves.” And it’s kind of retained this—this sort of maverick spirit ever since. And even today it’s run by a charity called Sustrans with bits and bobs of funding. Sometimes it gets government money, sometimes not. But it—yeah, it’s just very frustrating. But also, the more I looked into it, the more I realized what a miracle it is, really.

Laura Laker: So yeah, I kind of fell down the rabbit hole, and had these most wonderful adventures along these routes, because some of them are on old railway paths and so you get to see beautiful parts of the country. And it really takes you to some stunning parts of the UK, you know, across Scotland, and down in Cornwall there’s some fantastic ones. But yeah, it’s just you really don’t know what you’re going to get. So it’s quite an adventure.

Sarah: When you were in Cornwall, you had a little fun with it. You were, I think, on an e-bike, a pink e-bike, is that right?

Laura Laker: Yes.

Sarah: And you got the idea that it would be fun to cycle across Cornwall, which is apparently quite famously hilly.

Laura Laker: Fiercely hilly. [laughs]

Sarah: Fiercely hilly.

Doug: I’ve been there. It’s very hilly.

Sarah: That you would do that wearing dresses, and also with a shrub that you were delivering to your sister. Can you tell us a little bit about that Cornwall leg? Because that’s very fun.

Laura Laker: Yeah, that was fun. I mean, I have a love of whimsy and silliness, so I kind of wanted to do something daft. And I have this pink electric bike, which is very heavy. It weighs 25 kilos, which—I don’t want to do the maths. But anyway, it’s a very heavy bike, and it’s kind of a town bike and it’s got a basket on the front. And ever since I’ve had it—I mean, I was cycling a lot in London before on a regular bike, but then I got this pink e-bike and it kind of was just the most magical thing. And suddenly I’m whizzing around town. I don’t have to, you know, worry about getting sweaty where I arrive.

Laura Laker: And when I got to Cornwall—because I knew Cornwall from doing the Land’s End to John o’ Groats ride in 2019, also on an e-bike. And the Cornwall leg was the bit that I was most glad to have a motor. So I thought if I’m gonna go to Cornwall, I have to take the e-bike.

Laura Laker: And I’d done this cutting of a shrub from my next door neighbor’s garden in the first lockdown, and I wanted to take it to my sister. And I thought, “Well, I don’t have a car. If I take it on a train, it’s just gonna be a big fuss.” So I was like, right, what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna take it to my sister’s via Land’s End, which is the most westerly point of England, and I’m gonna cycle it across—across Cornwall. And I just love the idea of—you know, it’s just a fun idea.

Laura Laker: So in the shrub went, into a box. And it was really lovely, actually, because as I was riding along, it sort of—it wasn’t very big. These little leaves were sort of wafting around, like little hands waving. And everywhere I went, it just was like, very jolly. It kind of added a very jolly note to my travels because it was just like, seemed to be having a nice time in the front there. So yeah, I was just having a great time with the shrub. It was making me chuckle as I went along, which was helpful because Cornwall is extremely hilly. I think I cried, actually, it was so hilly I kept going the wrong way because the little signs sometimes are missing or sometimes get submerged into a hedge.

Laura Laker: And if you’ve ever been to the UK, you might have seen these funny little lanes that we have with really high hedges, and they’re super narrow. And I think it kind of scares American tourists because, you know, you have big roads there and it’s—if you meet another driver, you have to slam on the brakes. So we had an adventure, and the shrub made it across Cornwall, but it was quite a sort of slapstick leg of the journey. Which I think is important when you’re cycling. I think it’s important not to take it too seriously and to have some fun. And the dresses were part of that. I mean, I hate shopping for clothes, so I just kind of wear through my clothes and I’m like, “Oh, God, I have to go shopping again!” But I have all these dresses which I buy, thinking I’m going to wear them, then don’t wear them. So I thought now is the time to put on a dress and go cycling across the county. So that was my whimsical travel across Cornwall. It’s a lovely place, but my goodness, you need a motor.

Doug: Earlier you mentioned the people who sort of adopt the cycle network and put up stickers and maintain it and build things with their own hands. Can you talk about some of those people? You rode with some of these folks along the cycling network, specifically John Grimshaw and Caroline Levett.

Laura Laker: Yeah. Yeah, so John Grimshaw was one of the founders of Sustrans. And I mean, he was worried that I’d made too much of a fuss about his role, but he was one of the driving forces. So he was living in Bristol—still living in Bristol. He was living there in the late ’70s. And he was an engineer, a civil engineer, and he and some local Friends of the Earth kind of campaigners—and Friends of the Earth is a national environmental charity that has local branches. And so they were very much concerned about the environment, obviously. And one of the things they were worried about was the proliferation of motor traffic, and the provision for motor traffic above all other forms of transport, seemingly.

Laura Laker: And he wrote this sort of pamphlet in the ’70s about the growth in motor traffic, and it literally could have been written today. He was saying, you know, “Why are we investing all of this time and energy and money into something that’s not serving the sort of most journeys that we’re doing, which are short. It doesn’t make sense to get in your car for a mile or two. And why aren’t we building cycle routes so that kids can cycle safely?” And that was very much their driving aim.

Laura Laker: And so yeah, they got together with a bunch of other volunteers from environmental groups of various sorts. And it was a really kind of broad church of people. There were artists there, and so they all brought their own skill set to the party, if you like. And they held these protests in the local parks. and there was some kind of performance art there, so they tried to make music out of bits of bicycle and just make a bit of a spectacle. It’s really lovely, actually.

Laura Laker: So yeah, this went on for a while and they realized that the council weren’t taking notice. They just thought, “Well, we’re gonna have to just try and build something.” And so John, being an engineer, started going off and ‘surveying,’ you know, in inverted commas. They didn’t have access to land or any money, but he thought if he identified something, that maybe the next steps would present themselves. And so he found this old railway trail that led between Bristol and the next town and a river valley.

Laura Laker: And so, you know, over time they managed to get the permission to develop a path along the route. And then they got some money from the family trust of a shoe company called Clark’s. And so yeah, he promised them a nice rough path that would wear out lots of shoes.

Doug: [laughs]

Laura Laker: And so they gave him 10 grand, and that was the first bit of funding for the National Cycle Network. Which I just think is a lovely story. And so they got together and they—it was very ramshackle, and they had sort of—I’ve seen pictures of trailers that were attached to their old road bikes, because it was sort of late ’70s, early ’80s. And then kids got roped in and they were digging on the weekends. Again, eventually, you know, within five years, they’d done the first few miles. And it was all just volunteer power, pretty much. Amazing. And so, you know, eventually over time, this kind of morphed into other paths, other kind of local campaigners, and John would go along to advise them about what they needed to do in their area, from what he’d learned.

Laura Laker: And then eventually they got the ideas together that they would try and make a national network. There was some funding available from the National Lottery in the millennium, and so they thought they’d bid for a National Cycle Network. And they got all these people together and kind of bid for this big project. And yeah, there was no money for maintenance, so volunteers ended up, you know, being the maintenance. And so you get these people who are still, you know, the same people doing the same stretch 40, 50 years later.

Sarah: It makes me think about something that you write in the book. One of my favorite lines is “Ultimately, you get the user you build routes for.”

Laura Laker: [laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: And—you know, and the idea that if you invest money and resources and land and time and political power into a network of roads or routes, you will get the users that that network is designed for. And it’s sort of the concept of induced demand, right, that we normally talk about when we’re talking about highways. But when you build bike routes, they too, induce demand, right? That if you build the bike routes, then people will want to ride on them, and they will ride on them. And so I’m just very interested in the idea that if we built these routes out and when we do build them out, that they create their own constituencies.

Laura Laker: Yeah, that’s right. And one kind of example that I came across was up in the Lake District. You know, beautiful part of the country, but very hilly and really very few off-road paths, almost none. And there was this one that had been a dirt track and a few bridges kind of—and it was an old railway path across this beautiful little gorge. And there was a big storm in 2015. A load of water fell on a pass, and then it sort of ended up funneled into this narrow valley and just crushed these railway bridges. It was quite incredible. You know, we don’t get majorly extreme weather in the UK and so this was quite dramatic.

Laura Laker: And it took years to build these railway bridges back to put the cycle path back. And part of the reconstruction plan was to put tarmac down instead of the gravel. And because it’s the Lake District, and everyone knows and loves the Lake District and feels a kind of ownership over it, people got really angry about the idea of tarmac because, you know, this is the countryside, effectively. And never mind that the roads are obviously tarmac, and no one would think about having a main road as a dirt track.

Laura Laker: But it was a real fight for the national park. And they got some quite nasty comments, and from all over the country, they got a kind of tidal wave of emotion through kind of social media and emails and headlines in the national papers. But they held firm and they put the tarmac down, and these beautiful new bridges came in, and usership increased something like 300 percent?

Laura Laker: And it’s the same story up in the Pennines, which is another national park. They resurfaced what had been a very muddy pass, and they got an increase of 700 percent in users. And they couldn’t believe it, actually. They thought that there were numbers wrong on the counters, but in fact, no, you know, because it was so muddy before, people couldn’t use it. And the kinds of people that are using these paths now that they’re tarmac are people on mobility scooters, you know, those things with the little wheels, because you can’t go off road in those things, you really need a proper smooth surface.

Laura Laker: And these—you know, the kind of people that I saw using the path wouldn’t have been able to get out there before this had happened. And so you’ve got to think, what are people supposed to do, you know, if they have a wheelchair, they use a wheelchair or a mobility scooter? Are we kind of locking them out of the countryside? Is that really what we want? And I think we have an idea of the countryside being this kind of, you know, obviously a natural landscape, but you need to be able to access it. And I think, you know, retaining it for just the fit and the brave is really very unfair.

Doug: So Laura, in the book, you go for a ride with someone named Andy Cox, who is a London cop. He was the head of Vision Zero for the Metropolitan Police. Let’s talk about him, and how his attitudes towards policing and enforcement and investigation changed once he started getting out there and experiencing the roads for himself.

Laura Laker: [laughs] Yeah, so Andy Cox had been—well, he hadn’t been interested in road safety, he told me, which surprised me because I’d first met him when he was doing the Vision Zero work for the Metropolitan Police in London. And actually, he got given this job, and because it’s the police, you kind of get given a job and you just say yes, because it’s very hierarchical and it kind of becomes quite random. So it wasn’t something that he had particular interest in.

Laura Laker: But the thing that he started to realize when he began this work was that actually, unlike homicide, there weren’t the resources or even the evidence-based policing that you would see with other forms of crime. And it was really treated very differently, it was poorly resourced. And the impact on families and loved ones when someone’s killed or injured on the roads is really—you know, it’s as bad as any other death. And it’s—you know, it’s quite often a violent death. And the implications are so severe. And the numbers that we have in the UK, we have around 1,600 people die on the roads every year—around every 20 minutes someone’s killed or seriously injured. And so these are big numbers, and it’s more than homicide and terrorism combined, you know, times a few, but it just doesn’t get that kind of attention.

Laura Laker: So he was really fascinated, and wanted to bring his expertise from working on homicide to this field. And I think he was surprised at the resistance that he got. And I think this is, you know, possibly the same with other areas of policing and just life. Nobody likes change or changing the way they’re doing things or being told they’re doing it wrong.

Laura Laker: So he had a bit of an uphill battle. But one of the things that the National Police Chief Council that he was working with wanted to do—and still want to do—is to change language. And so I talked to him about these guidelines that I produced in 2021, and he’s been really supportive of them. And the ride that we did, actually, on the Isle of Wight, where he’s from, was the first time he’d gotten on a bike for 20 years. Which surprised me because yeah, he’s been such a great advocate and so outspoken around protecting cyclists and pedestrians and just road users in general. But for him, it’s not coming from a place of, you know, he’s a cyclist, it’s coming from a place of, you know, the evidence is showing us that a lot of people are being harmed, and the implications, you know, ripple out through society and we’re really not doing enough about it.

Laura Laker: And so I think he was really interesting in that role. He’s since moved on to other areas of policing, and I’m sure he’s doing, you know, as much of a great job there. But he was really great at promoting, and he would call things out on social media and talk to different police forces about what they were doing and what they were saying, trying to get them to change the language that they were using and the way that they were talking about road collisions.

Sarah: Another thing that you say he did that I think is so interesting is he started insisting that contributory factors to crashes be put into police reports, so that when people are looking at the data about road deaths, they will see not just this was a bicyclist that was hit by a driver, but also the driver was speeding. Therefore, it would show that these were preventable, that these were the result of actual infractions of the legal code in many cases.

Sarah: And also you say that Andy Cox used the term “road crime” to refer to things like speeding, which I thought was really interesting. I’d never actually heard that exact formulation. But the importance of language is so huge. How did you get involved in writing these recommendations for how we talk about road safety and road deaths?

Laura Laker: Yeah, so it was Adam Tranter’s fault, actually—he’s on my podcast with me—because I just started doing some work with the Active Travel Academy, which is the University of Westminster in London, and I had a day a week funded to do a project of my choosing, which was amazing. And I started off doing something about pedestrian deaths on pavements because I wanted to highlight the impact of, you know, road danger and the fact that even on the pavement, sometimes you’re not safe.

Laura Laker: But then the pandemic happened and, you know, the numbers of deaths we were getting was obviously dwarfing that. And I think it just wouldn’t have got the traction. But then the idea of doing these guidelines came up and, you know, Adam was right. This was the issue of how we talk about road crashes and road danger and where it’s coming from and how to improve road safety in the media just doesn’t reflect the reality. And it’s kind of this really strange scenario where, you know, something happens involving a cyclist, and all of the newspapers want to talk about it and all the news outlets want to talk about it, but then the everyday carnage that’s happening on our roads around vehicle collisions, people crashing in their cars, just doesn’t get the traction.

Laura Laker: And the narrative we get around cycling can be really toxic. And I know that when there’s a particular article that gains traction with the public that talks about cyclists being dangerous or reckless, that people who are cycling start to worry about their own safety and how drivers are going to perceive them, and potentially being punished by certain drivers for, you know, for being a cyclist. And so the real-world implications are really serious. And so I started to look into this and, you know, what would guidelines look like? And I looked at, you know, we’ve got suicide reporting guidelines since the—in the last few years. We’ve got ones about domestic violence. And it’s because we know that language drastically influences how we think about the world and what we focus on.

Laura Laker: And so yeah, so I started to look at what—you know, what guidelines would include, and I thought, you know, how do we try and change this narrative around cycling? So yeah, I came up with the draft guidelines, did a consultation, and then lots and lots of people came back. I talked to people who work in the media, I talked to road safety charities, cycling organizations, academics and police, and then came up with the final 10 guidelines, which I published in 2021.

Laura Laker: And the aim was for media to be using them. But the problem was that the media doesn’t really want to change what it’s doing. Journalists don’t like being told what to do. And I’m a journalist and I hate being told what to do, so I do have some sympathy. But one of the excuses or reasons for—you know, one of the guidelines is don’t say “accident.” And people who write for the media talk about kind of—or, you know, when I was studying journalism, it was the kind of “man in the pub, “the conversation that you’d have with someone in the pub, and use basic language and you don’t include jargon. And “accident” was considered to be the kind of language that people use. And people do use it and, you know, I would still find myself slipping up and saying “accident,” too. Yeah, there just—there was a real resistance to changing the language, so stopping using the word “accident.”

Laura Laker: And another thing that I really found difficulty with was trying to get people to say “driver” and not just “car.” So you get this kind of language, “the car crashed.” And sometimes it’s quite extreme. “The car deliberately crashed into X,” and you just think, well, you know, it’s taking things to an extreme and it’s not accurate. You know, the number one tenet of journalism is accuracy and it’s guideline one. It’s about being accurate and, you know, we’re just not accurate at the moment. And so yeah, anyway, so I didn’t have much luck with media outlets. A few kind of cycling titles and a few people who got it were changing their language.

Laura Laker: But I know that your guest from fairly recently, Tara Goddard, had done some really interesting research, firstly around the impact of language. So, you know, who you focus the article on if you’re talking about a collision. And by changing the focus from a pedestrian to a driver, you can change the focus by 30 percent, which is huge. Even bigger is if you add context. So X number of collisions have happened in this area within a month, or speeding is a contributing factor in X number of collisions. And then people start to put together oh, this isn’t just a random, isolated incident, this is part of a pattern, and therefore it’s preventable and predictable.

Laura Laker: And so after she’d published, she and Kelcie Ralph and Calvin Thigpen had published this research, they did one where they worked with police because they identified the same issue that I realized in the UK is that a lot of media language is coming directly from police releases. So a collision will happen, the police will say, “This happened. These are the vehicles involved,” usually. And so that gets copied and pasted quite often. And so the idea is if you can go upstream and look at the police language, then you can start to change the way that the media talks about things. And so she’d done an experiment in New Jersey, I believe, and so I thought I’d try and do the same here.

Doug: So Laura, you have 10 guidelines. You talked about a couple of them just now, about replacing the word “car” with “driver,” not saying “accident.” I wonder if we could talk about the larger pieces that you recommend in here, one of which I really like, and it says, “Journalists should consider whether language used negatively generalizes a person or their behavior as part of a group.” Can you give some good examples of how we shift that? Obviously, tabloid culture in the UK, anti-cycling coverage in the UK is like nothing we even have here in New York.

Laura Laker: Oh, really?

Doug: It’s much more intense.

Laura Laker: It’s worse?

Doug: I think it’s much worse, yes. And I think it’s pretty bad here in terms of the New York Post. But when you look at the London tabloids, yes, I think it’s much worse. And my heart goes out to cycling advocates in the UK for what they have to deal with. Talk about pushing back against that narrative that, you know, a cyclist runs a red light or gets hit and therefore all cyclists are dangerous and a menace. And how do you push back against that journalistic narrative?

Laura Laker: Yeah, it’s really tricky, and I think it comes under fair comment. And this is kind of where it gets quite difficult. Journalists have got, as anyone has, a right to their opinion and to share their opinion, and there’s really nothing in regular kind of journalistic guidelines to stop them from doing that. And so where I ended up focusing my attention was around the accuracy and the balance, and, you know, specific words and saying “driver,” and trying to really sort of drill down on the accuracy part because, you know, having sort of thought about this—and we do have really dreadful pieces about cycling.

Laura Laker: And you never get the same with motor vehicle danger, with driver danger. There’s really very much a kind of pass given to dangerous behavior on the roads. You know, it’s getting worse. Police are saying that speeding is increasing. And, you know, if anyone talks about catching speeding drivers, someone in the media will say this is just an exercise to take money from drivers, and really ignoring the fact that speed is one of the biggest contributing factors to collisions and deaths on the roads.

Laura Laker: So it’s really frustrating and it’s sad and it’s enraging at points to see this kind of language. And I sometimes get asked to be a talking head on radio shows and sometimes TV. And it’s usually about when someone cycling has done something, or when there’s a proposal to crack down on cyclists. And it really feeds into, you know, how we kind of tackle road danger. And only this week, the government’s proposing some new rules, some new offences on the roads. There’s 13 of them, 11 of which are focused on cycling, frustratingly. And so this really feeds in. And yeah, it’s a very, very difficult one to change. So that’s kind of the reason that I focus on the “accident” and on the say “driver,” not “car,” and on adding context, because we know that those are things that can feed in from the professional field into media reporting, and try and give the public a bit more of a sense of actually what’s happening on the road isn’t cyclists mowing people down, it’s actually the dangers coming from elsewhere.

Doug: The other thing I really like about the report, you include a list of experts and organizations that look, let’s be honest, I say this with all respect for my colleagues in the media. Sometimes we can be lazy and we just want to call the first person that comes to mind because you’re on a deadline. I don’t mean that pejoratively, like, it’s a fast moving thing. You just call the first person who comes to mind, and you get a quote from them. And they may not be the best person to speak with. And your report includes a pretty extensive list of cycling organizations, road safety organizations, which I think is great and a really good model for US-based and North American-based cycling and pedestrian safety organizations. Like, get these lists to the journalist before the crash happens, before the crisis happens, so that when they have to find that expert quote, they’re not going to—I think here we have various road safety things that are usually fronts for driver’s rights. The motorists—American Motorists Association? It’s some random thing, not the AAA. Talk about how that list came together, and I think it’s just a great model for what we should be doing everywhere.

Laura Laker: Yeah, because journalists aren’t experts on everything. They tend to be generalists. And I think some issues around traffic and constricting traffic, for example, can be quite counterintuitive, and having journalists get briefings from experts who aren’t just, you know, the usual suspects can be really powerful because, you know, journalists want to do a good job, but there’s always that pressure to—you know, to get the clicks, especially now everything’s online.

Laura Laker: But yeah, my 10th guideline is sort of encouraging journalists to get that context on the broader issues around road safety, and to use those professionals who are very, very happy to help. I mean, the fact of these new offenses being proposed in the UK, road safety organizations are saying well, these aren’t priorities, actually. You know, they’ve clearly come from more of the sort of tabloid focus on cycling danger and not actual facts. So it does have a huge impact. It feeds into politicians’ ears because politicians also mostly aren’t experts. And so yeah, if you can change media narrative, you can really have a big impact on decision makers and how they understand issues.

Sarah: As you may have heard, we very recently here in the city of New York were able to turn on the cameras for congestion pricing after years and decades of struggling to get that to happen. Don’t know how long it’s gonna last, frankly, but …

Doug: And it may not last to the end of us recording this episode. We don’t know.

Sarah: Yes. And when we are airing this episode, it could very well not exist anymore.

Laura Laker: No, you’re joking!

Sarah: Oh, yeah. No, I’m not joking because like I said, we live in the United States of America and all bets are off. All bets are off. But I’m interested in hearing your perspective as somebody who has lived through the transition that London has made, not only with congestion pricing and the ultra-low emission zones and reducing speed limits in various neighborhoods and constructing a fairly robust cycle network within the City of London, what has your perception been of the way London has been changed by this holistic approach to slowing down traffic, reducing congestion, improving air quality, making a better bike network, all of that. Has it made a real palpable difference in your life?

Laura Laker: Yeah, massive. And I think it’s worth remembering back in 2010, in his first term as mayor of London, he announced plans to remove what was then the western extension of the original congestion charge zone. Now this had been a hugely successful measure, and it instantly reduced traffic in the central zone by something like 18 percent and then reduced congestion by 30 percent. So it was, as a policy measure, a success. That was Ken Livingstone, the first mayor of London. And then he came in, and he wanted to make his own mark. And so he did remove the western zone, which was the kind of Kensington and Chelsea area, which was his—you know, his kind of constituent, more of a conservative side of London. But then five years later, he announced plans for the ultra-low emission zone, which then was introduced by Sadiq Khan in 2019.

Laura Laker: So, you know, just to give you a bit of hope, I think backward steps are part of the forward trajectory, unfortunately. And he really changed his mind. And he was playing politics with it by the end as we’d expect, but it has made a big difference. And when the ultra-low emission zone was being proposed in 2019, I met a couple of people who’d said that they were getting rid of their vehicles because of ULEZ. It was just that final kind of tipping point which made the car not make sense for them anymore. I know my neighbors got rid of one of their cars. Yeah, so it does have an impact. And then, you know, it has improved air quality further. So yeah, you know, it’s been successful.

Sarah: And just riding around, does it—does it feel different? I mean, how has the experience of riding around London evolved over the last 15 years?

Laura Laker: Yeah, it’s hard to say in terms of traffic because it’s kind of—I mean, yeah, I’m out at various random times of day. You know, being self employed, I’m kind of darting here, there and everywhere, really, so—at different times of day. But one thing that has really, really improved in London since I’ve lived here since 2007 is the cycle lanes and the sheer volumes of people cycling here. And I don’t know, I’d say within the last five, ten years, the sort of—the demographic of people cycling has really changed. So it used to very much be guys in Lycra, helmets, road bikes, the fit and the brave, very much. And since, I don’t know, since the kind of—we had a bike lane that went to Stratford near where I live in East London, and then that just ended at a gyratory, like this multi-lane, one way sort of washing machine of traffic. And it was horrible to ride on, so you kind of got there and you were left to your own devices. And so you really just had the brave people riding on the bike lane because that’s who could get there.

Laura Laker: And then a few years, a couple of years ago, they removed the one-way system and put bike lanes in. And they did do a great job. It was really, really nice, actually—planting and just much more people friendly. And since then you really started to see much more kind of representative demographic of people cycling. So yeah, just regular folk, much more diverse, a lot more women, a lot more kind of regular bikes, like, sit up and, you know, Citi Bikes, which is great to see. And yeah, so that’s been a fantastic transformation. And just cycling across London, quite often I’ll go somewhere I haven’t been for a while and suddenly there’s a bike lane or a new low-traffic neighborhood. It’s really exciting.

Doug: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the politics have changed, because we’re talking about Boris Johnson, Conservative. Here in New York, a lot of the bike lanes were started under Mike Bloomberg, former Republican and very conservative billionaire. Today, the politics have just completely bifurcated. Everything is put into these little buckets of, like, bike lanes are left coded, Democratic, even farther left than that initiative. And bringing the cars back, that’s for the Conservatives, that’s for the Republicans. How have you seen that evolve and change? Because now I know the ULEZ, for example, that was a big fight, and the low-traffic neighborhoods continue to be a big fight. How have the politics changed in the last, let’s say, 15, 20 years?

Laura Laker: Yeah. So Boris Johnson is a Conservative, which is on the right. Yeah, he was a real cheerleader for this stuff. And I think theoretically, cycling is one of those things that could appeal to either side. I mean, on the one hand, it’s kind of individualism; you’re not paying taxes to do it. It’s about kind of going under your own steam. But on the other hand, it’s very kind of egalitarian, and it should be a great leveler. But yeah, it has been weaponized, and it’s been used as a real wedge issue. And the government here in the UK in the last, I don’t know, five or so years has really started to use cycling and sort of what it calls anti-motorist measures as a—as a wedge issue to try and drive.

Laura Laker: And there was a North London election, Uxbridge by-election, where an MP, a Member of Parliament election was happening. And they tried to claim that the results were people railing against ULEZ expansion, but actually they’d kind of interpreted it wrong because the Conservative candidate that won won quite narrowly, and actually the Labour candidate had done much better than any sort of Labour candidate previously. But that was all just the narrative. But it really has become unfortunately weaponized on both sides in a way of the political divide. And yeah, there’s a lot of misinformation around it, and this sort of false sense that Britons are motorists.

Laura Laker: And Rishi Sunak, our last prime minister before the current one, he talked about how Britons were motorists and, you know, forgetting the fact that people only drive because often there just aren’t other options. You know, where I grew up, there was a bus. I was in the countryside, and there were—you know, you had to learn to drive at 17 or you just didn’t—you couldn’t get anywhere. I hitchhiked until then.

Laura Laker: So it’s—yeah, it’s this whole narrative is just very kind of—very pervasive. We had a new government in July last year. We got a Labour government for the first time in a long time, and that was exciting because they were starting to talk about active travel, cycling and walking as a health initiative, as a solution to Britain becoming actually quite unhealthy. The health of the nation has declined, I think our life expectancy has declined and we’re becoming the sick man of Europe again, which is a title that got bandied around in the ’70s. So yeah, we’re not a very healthy nation, and this government is supposedly seeing active travel as a way of trying to help that.

Laura Laker: And actually, the last transport minister read my book over the last summer. I got a couple of texts. I was cycling in France, I got a couple of texts from people, and she tweeted about it. And she read the whole thing, and we went for a bike ride afterwards because she liked it so much. Sadly, she’s no longer in post. But, you know, she said some great things about what the government wanted, and about it being, you know, about health and about transport unlocking all other departments. And, you know, she didn’t want to be a health minister originally, but once she—you know, like Andy Cox, once she got into it, she started to realize just the power of transport to enable so many other areas of policy. And so she was talking about long-term funding and about integrating it into kind of proper transport planning, and about changing the way that we decide about roads and cycle lanes. And just, you know, someone talking like someone who really understands their brief.

Laura Laker: And she was talking about the end to the culture wars. Yeah, I think there is definitely a move away from that now with this government. But they seem to sort of be, I don’t know, sort of shifting back with certain narratives around, “We’re still pro motorists.” Yeah, so they still need leadership, but it’s definitely not as bad as the last lot. I mean, we had—our previous transport minister was talking about conspiracy theories around low-traffic neighborhoods and 15-minute cities, saying that councils were forcing people to stay in their neighborhoods, which is just utterly bizarre. So yeah, it’s definitely an improvement.

Sarah: When you talk about those health impacts of these policy decisions, that brings me to one of the things that I found the most moving about your book and the most illuminating. You talk about your father and how your father died young of a heart attack, and you write, “Perhaps my work in cycling is in the hope others could be spared losing a parent from a heart attack so young.” And I just wondered if you could speak to that, and how we’re talking in grand political terms, we’re talking about big policy decisions, big budget decisions, but at the end this is about people’s lives.

Laura Laker: Yeah. And I kind of um-ed and ah-ed about including this because I don’t know, it has to have a reason for being there. But I think it is easy to forget, like you say, that ultimately all of these big decisions affect people’s lives in very individual and very personal and quite profound ways.

Laura Laker: And I grew up in the countryside. There was a 60-mile-an-hour road, it was about two or three miles to the nearest town. But we didn’t really—you know, you couldn’t really cycle. I mean, you could, but it would have been really dangerous. And there was a sort of dirt track that me and my dad and my sister used to cycle on. But yeah, I mean he wasn’— his health wasn’t very good. He didn’t look after himself. He was a very heavy smoker, drank too much, ate badly, was very stressed at work and, you know, didn’t really exercise at all actually. I think quite athletic naturally. I mean, he was really into motor racing as a youngster, and I think would have probably cycled more if there had been routes.

Laura Laker: And yeah, it did strike me. I mean, he’d been hit by a driver at 16, and it had quite a profound impact on him. He’d ended up in hospital, and I do think that had kind of trickled down throughout his life to the point where yeah, he just didn’t make it to 50. And as a motor racing driver, he had known kind of other drivers who’d been killed on the roads who were very—you know, very skilled and he was very—he was kind of obsessive about road safety as well. And I think that’s partly where I got it from as well.

Laura Laker: And I studied nutrition at university, and I think that was probably part of this same journey. Like, you know, how do you stop that from happening to people, you know, someone’s lifestyle kind of cutting short their life? I mean, I was 14, my sister was 16 when he died. And it’s just yeah, so young. You know, it’s obviously such a shame because he hasn’t got to see so much of, you know, what’s happened since and my nephews and, you know, what I’ve gotten up to since. But yeah, it’s just one thing I learned when I was studying nutrition—I was going to be a dietitian for a while—was if you can weave physical activity into people’s lives, you can actually have a massive impact on their health. Yeah, and so cycling is one of the things that does that, and it does kind of make me reflect back and think, gosh, I think probably my career decisions since then, the only things I’ve wanted to stick at have been with this sense of a bit of a mission, actually. And, you know, just trying to feel like I’m contributing something positive, for one, but also, I guess, there is possibly that motivation of thinking back and thinking that was preventable.

Sarah: Yeah. And so many of the deaths that happen on the roads are preventable, and all the associated deaths from air pollution and …

Laura Laker: Yeah. And one in six deaths in the UK are due to inactivity. So, you know, this happens to people every day. You know, they lose someone because their lifestyle, for whatever reason—it’s not always people’s fault. We kind of live in a—there’s a lot of work pressure. We don’t have the opportunity to exercise, we don’t have the time.

Doug: Well, that’s the lovely thing, I think, about your work, is that you’re approaching it from all angles—language, health, lifestyle. You know, Peter Walker, who we’ve had on the show, he has his book, The Miracle Cure, you know, is about walking. And I think about that. Cycling, too, it’s almost like there’s nothing it can’t do, and it does unlock all of these other things.

Laura Laker: Yeah, exactly. And people say, you know, people don’t want to cycle, but actually, polls tell us that people do. And I think if you can tap into different areas of interest, you can start to build this picture of not just with individuals, but with decision makers. I guess people get into politics for a reason, whether that be health or equality or opportunity or economics or—and the great thing about cycling is that it ticks all of these boxes. And so if you can find that way in, you can really kind of get someone on board. And it’s about, you know, this could be such a wonderful thing for so many areas of our lives. You know, just the simple joy of being able to get out on a bike ride. I mean, yeah, or just, you know, go for a nice walk somewhere and get some fresh air. Yeah, I think we talk about commuting journeys a lot, but the ability to get out into green space is so important. I think we’ve realized that in the last five years, just the enormous impact on our mental health and physical health of just being able to get out and see some nature and hear birdsong and just meet people on a path is really, really powerful.

Doug: Or to take nature with you by putting a shrub on your bicycle and carrying it around through the hills of Cornwall.

Laura Laker: [laughs] And the shrub still lives as well, amazingly.

Doug: Excellent.

Sarah: Thank you, Laura, so much for joining us. It’s really been a pleasure, and we can’t wait to see what you do next.

Laura Laker: Thanks for having me.

Sarah: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thank you again to Laura Laker. We’ll put links in the show notes to her work, including her terrific book Potholes and Pavements.

Doug: The War on Cars is supported in part by the Helen and William Mazer Foundation. We thank them for their generosity.

Sarah: Remember, you can support us on Patreon and get all sorts of benefits by going to Patreon.com/thewaroncars and signing up today. We’d like to give a big thanks to everyone who already supports us on Patreon, including our top contributors: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund and Virginia Baker.

Doug: And just a reminder, we are doing a live show on April 24 in the Twin Cities. We will be in Minneapolis. Our Streets, which is a great advocacy organization, is bringing us out there. We will put a link for tickets in the show notes. Can’t wait to do that show. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Sarah: So much fun. This episode was recorded at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio by Josh Wilcox. It was edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear and transcripts are by Russell Gragg. I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon. And this is The War on Cars.