The headline feels like pure clickbait.
E-bikes are the way to go. They fill the gap between bike-able distances and those requiring alternate propulsion for many people. And depending on your diet, they're in some cases more environmentally friendly than normal bicycles per distance traveled. That doesn't even matter, since both are an order of magnitude better than the automobile.
It's crazy that we're spending thousands to subsidize electric vehicles and mostly ignoring e-bikes.
You must live in a warm climate - these are the only people who suggest bikes as a replacement for vehicles. Riding a bike in the winter is really difficult. It's not impossible, it's just so much of a challenge that it's not even worth entertaining as an idea - just drive a car with a roof and heater.
Plus, they are not usable in many weather conditions.
Proper cycling and walking infrastructure combined with a reduction of car usage in cities makes cycling an extremely safe activity. In addition the extra health benefits from physical exercise more than offsets any increase in risk from a collision at a societal level.
As for cyling not being usable in many weather conditions - perhaps in extreme winters, but in London there're very few days in the year, if any, that I can't happily ride the 22km round trip to work and back.
Contrast that to the fact that I've never been injured in a car, even though I've been in a few accidents.
As it stands, the current infrastructure is basically hostile at every level.
I've, thankfully, never been injured in a car accident.
I realize this is anecdotal, but there's strong reasons to believe bicycles are dangerous all by themselves. Traveling at high velocities with little protection on only two wheels is a recipe for accidents.
I assume velomobiles or recumbent tricycles would be much safer, if one doesn't mind the looks from passerby.
Also the graph comparing motoring costs to public transport costs is questionable.
Personally, we downsized from two car houshold to a single car. Car doing the school, grocery and weekend duty, Tfl for commuting.
The car costs about £30 (fuel) per week hauling up to five people at a time. Tfl costs £51 per week per person. If you mix Tfl + Train then it costs £77 per week per person. (Using the Train also has a noticable effect on my mental health, currently fortunate enough to have access to Tfl without relying on Train, hope that continues)
It's the amount of people that need to move from A to B which is the problem and not how they move from A to B.
If all the people switched to electric cars, it's still ALL the VERY SAME NUMBER of people. Local emissions may go down, but then the energy to charge all those electric vehicles will affect "something somewhere else".
If all the people stopped using cars, switched to bicycles, then it's still ALL THE VERY SAME NUMBER of people getting from A to B maybe at the same rate as they were before the switch. This will help with noise and emissions, but... the traffic will be the same.
In London, being on a bicycle is life threatening. Not saying that motorists and bus drivers are out there to "get 'em", rather there is very little space on the roads. Several times the typical scene is that of a biker being followed by up to ten cars until the cars get an opportunity to overtake. Which happens after several minutes due to lack of space.
Won't the traffic be better with smaller transport (like bike)?
In the 1970's nobody drove 100 miles on a daily basis to get to work although there was a small army of travelling salesmen in 'rep' cars that did put in the miles.
Nowadays those reps are probably flying so nothing has improved on that front.
It is hard to untangle this mess, people have careers, kids at schools and considerable investment in automobiles. Also, when companies merge there can be highly dysfunctional travel arrangements going on as a result.
If it is bicycles all the way then that could mean electric bicycles, which means an effective maximum travel distance of 15 miles or an hour of travel time each way.
A government could unpick and sort the mess out, for instance, in the public sector you might find you have people from city A commuting to work in city B and vice-versa to do similar jobs, e.g. in the NHS or education. A government could look at this and use their weight to pay for people to do a job swap, so pay grades are the same but people are working locally. For instance, we have a secondary school French teacher in city A working in city B, and another in city B working in city A. There could be a straightforward incentive to un-do this travel mismatch, where everyone wins. Under normal circumstances opportunities for the French teacher in city A to get a job in city A might not come along. Same for the counterpart in city B.
This would have knock on effects in the private sector as the main earner in the household might be able to also go for a more local job at a lower pay rate with benefits in getting two hours of their life back every day.
The bicycle definitely can be part of this future, if the government could get a sizeable quantity of public sector workers to have local jobs part of the package could include electric bicycles.
Not really disagreeing per se, but I think it's worth taking a look at the numbers. I got them from Wikipedia [1]. The lastest numbers they have are from 2017: 721 thousand journeys per day and 10 deaths per year. That's 0.0000038% chance of death per journey (although presumably about 40x that for serious injury, or 0.00015% per journey). While I appreciate that it's scary to ride in traffic, very unlikely to ever be killed on a bicycle in London. Not good as it should be, but over the last 10-20 years you can see that improvements have been made and I hope we'll see more to come in the future.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_London#Statistics
And full disclosure, I have not yet tried cycling in London.
But from a car drivers perspective, to me it seems that if by any chance, I made a contact with a cyclist even at breaking speed, I would injur the poor soul very badly.
And when I play that back but me being the cyclist... I can't get myself to get on a bike.
Having said that, I don't want to take away from your point that a lot of people will always feel too uncomfortable to ride in city traffic and I don't blame them. It's just that I often hear people complain about the safety of cycling in London and it's actually a pretty safe city to ride in (though it can definitely get better). The previous mayor was notorious for spending money on improving cycling in London and I think the stats bear that out. I left the UK in 2015, so I don't know what the current mayor is doing.
As someone who bike commutes 10 miles in the US, this couldn't possibly be the case for me.
There is almost never a car impeded by my presence. I spend part of my ride in a bike lane and most of the rest on a bike route through neighborhoods that aren't heavily used for car commuting.
Even when there are cars, they quickly have a chance to pass (and inversely in heavy traffic I filter right through them).
I have travelled/driven between the west coast and middle of Arizona (and somewhat into Utah) and road infrastructure generally was much much better than what we have here in the U.K.
As a relative/subjective view, consider that on most major roads in London, it will be difficult to place two London buses side-by-side. (try walking between Bank and let's say Baker Street)
In CA, Silicon Valley proper or south of San Jose or going even further into Southern California, most residential streets are large enough to allow parking even big RVs (almost as big as London Buses) adjacent and still leaving space for cars to move about. From what I remember of San Francisco, the main roads were very wide (streets not so much), it was not difficult to manoeuvre a Chevy Suburban, whereas in London you can rent a studio roughly the size of that vehicle.
The solution here would add & maintain bike lanes (or a stand-alone bike road), but for the above example that would mean deforesting and cutting into 2 or 3 km of hillside. And for the duration of that effort, suspending the primary road between the city and {university, one suburb, one autobahn access} which also happens to be the secondary connection to {two additional suburbs, another autobahn access}.
The report also addresses autonomous driving:
> The other great technological change under way on the roads is driverless cars.
> The report warns this dream could also turn sour as car owners may choose to live many miles from their workplace, using their car as a mobile office while sitting in traffic jams they have helped to create.
In many places, it's not.cits a lifestyle problem where people value their own perceived convenience without considering any externalities.
I live in a small (500k people) city, where the school you go to depends on what part of town you live in. Each school has probably less than a half mile's radius. Yet despite this, a large number of people still drive their kids to school.
People don't use trains because "they're expensive, and I might need to leave 8 minutes early or later some day", despite not considering the cost of fuel, parking in a city centre for a day, and maintenance of their car. They don't use buses because they're "inconvenient" despite tge fact a months bus pass in my city is cheaper than 2 days parking in the city, and all the major artery routes are served at 5-10 minute intervals during peak hours.
People living in these kinds of situations won't change unless they're forced to
That's an unfortunate side-effect of trains having timetables. When a train is 5 minutes late, it's really frustrating because a) you don't have any agency, b) you usually cannot see anything related to the reason for the delay, and c) the idle waiting makes the time feel longer.
When a car is stuck in traffic for 30 minutes, it doesn't feel like you're losing 30 minutes. It just feels like a force of nature happening to you, and also it feels shorter than waiting for a train for 30 minutes because you're still engaged in the act of driving. You still have some agency because you have the choice of trying to change to that other lane that always feels like it's moving faster.
I especially worry about autonomous cars since, that would make taking long trips by car more convenient.