competing for road space.
This is utopianism at its best: idealistic, dramatic and not too bothered about the practicalities. I like it
because I don’t like cars and have never owned one. Murray is right to point out that cars are wasteful and
dangerous and that cities shouldn’t be built around them. The average car spends 95 per cent of its time
parked, and 20 square miles of London is given over to car parking.
Then the doubts creep in. If zero carbon is your objective, abolishing private car ownership is irrelevant.
The simplest way of achieving that would be to make all cars electric, and to generate all electricity from the
wind, sun, water or nuclear reactors.
There are other reasons for cutting down on cars, but they tend to be aesthetic or to do with the efficient
use of scarce resources. I think streets without metal boxes crowding the sides look better than the normal
kind; and, if more people used taxis and car-sharing, the average vehicle would be used more than 5 per
cent of the time.
But Murray’s plan for a car-free London did make me think about how much the city has changed in the 19
years it has had a directly elected mayor. Because the centre of London is already mostly free of private cars.
They have to pay to go in the congestion zone and there is now an ultra-low-emissions zone as well. So most
of the vehicles going round Parliament Square (when it is not blocked by protesting taxi-drivers) are taxis,
delivery vans, buses – and bicycles.
Five big things have changed since Ken Livingstone was elected mayor in 2000. More skyscrapers, more
buses, better underground trains, the congestion charge and the bicycles. The net effect is that the city is
much better to live in, and one and a half million more people live in it, making it more expensive.
One of the most interesting changes is the bikes. They interest me because I started using Boris bikes last
year. They are a wonderful way to get around central London. They are safe – I use them only on the
segregated cycle lanes – and I get more exercise than I did.
From what we know, he is an interventionist politician with at least some
record of getting things done
What is relevant to current politics is that they are still called Boris bikes. He set up the bike hire scheme as
mayor of London in 2010. Just as significantly, he pressed ahead with the disruption of traffic caused by
building dedicated cycle lanes all over the centre of the city.
This has transformed transport in London. To start off with, road users fumed as they sat in jams next to
empty cycle lanes, and they still often look pretty empty in the middle of the day, partly because bikes take
up so little space compared with cars. But in the rush hours the cycle lanes feel like a peloton in a
professional cycling race.
This matters to people who are not fair-weather cyclists in London, because Boris Johnson is now prime
minister. For a long time, I used to call them Ken bikes because I thought it was unfair that his successor
took the credit for a scheme that Livingstone had started. But when I looked into it, all Livingstone did was
agree a scheme in principle. It was Johnson who did the difficult bit of delivering it – and in particular of
building the segregated cycle lanes that make the big difference.
This is at odds with the recent portrayal of Johnson as a right-wing, small-state Conservative, which is often
based on little more than his wish to leave the EU. From what we know of him, he is an interventionist
politician with at least some record of getting things done. His bikes, his opposition to Heathrow expansion,