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Hackney has been declared the cycling capital of
London after research showed that more residents commute to work by bike
than by car.
The figures, drawn from the 2011 Census by the Office of National
Statistics, reveal that 14.6 per cent - or one in seven - of Hackney
residents use a bike as their main method of getting to work.
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This is the highest bike ridership in London - neighbouring Islington is
second on 9.6 per cent - and is three-and-a-half times higher than the
city-wide average of four per cent.
Trevor Parsons, coordinator of the London Cycling Campaign in Hackney,
said “demographic and geographical factors” were responsible for the
popularity of cycling in the borough.
“It’s a flat borough and it’s within striking distance to areas where
employment is reasonably good,” he told the Standard. This was
accompanied by a population rise of 44,000 over the decade and the
growth of Hackney as home to a young, fashionable population more likely
to cycle, he said.
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Another factor was the council’s willingness to redesign junctions and
one-way streets to include cycle lanes, and the ability to cycle in all
council parks, such as London Fields. A key change was the removal of
the “racetrack” Shoreditch gyratory system, which was both a hazard and
a danger to cycling in the south of the borough.
Mr Parsons, whose group has more than 1,000 paid-up members, said:
“Quite often we get closures of streets to stop rat-running. But we had
a programme a few years ago where they were all re-examined to make them
much more inviting to cyclists. These are quite small details in
themselves but they make a difference to a journey .
“Hackney is by no means perfect and there is still the feeling that the
politicians do tread gingerly around the sensitivities of people who own
cars. But I think we’re a lot better than somewhere like Newham, where
car driving is seen as the thing to which people can aspire.”
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Since the last Census in 2001, the ONS found that the number of
Londoners cycling to work had risen from 77,000 to 161,000 - a rise of
109 per cent.
The figures, which exclude the use of Boris bikes, put Lambeth in third
place in terms of the number of residents who cycle to work (8.1 per
cent), followed by Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Southwark
(all 7.4 per cent). The worst boroughs were Harrow (0.8 per cent) and
Havering (0.9 per cent).
The City of London is the only other London borough where more residents
cycle than drive to work, though this is skewed because of its tiny
residential population of 7,400.
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