It’s a beautiful sunny morning in Manchester as I set off on my bike on the three mile journey into town. I look at the people in their cars and think, “how wonderful it is to be outside on a day like this”. But then, just a couple of streets along, a car pulls out from a side street and straight across the bike lane. I brake and just avert a collision. At the next lights a van has stopped in the green advance bike box, forcing me to hover between the narrow lines of cars. As the van moves away I get a faceful of fetid fumes. As I reach the city centre, I wait at a busy junction. The lights change and I move off - and narrowly avoid obliteration in the shape of three or four cars that have jumped the red light. Nearing my destination I find myself on a major city centre street, seemingly safe in a bike lane - but then it just ends, without warning, throwing me out into the path of a bus. I arrive at work fuming at the wrongdoing and the injustice, and vowing to petition Manchester City Council, the police, 10 Downing Street and the United Nations. Cycling in Manchester is nearly always enough to ruin your day.
And it’s not just me - anyone who runs the gauntlet of cycling in Manchester will tell you a similar tale. I carried out a spot poll of a group of regular cyclists, and their gripes were many and varied. Potholes. People opening car doors into your path. Drivers who don’t indicate. Rubbish bike lanes. Cars parked in the rubbish bike lanes. Angry van drivers who think cyclists are a bunch of remoaners who should pay road tax (even though it doesn’t exist).
Maybe we should all move to Groningen, the Dutch city where 50% of kids cycle to school. If cycling around Manchester is often like playing a high-octane video game with the level set to 'impossible', in Groningen it’s more akin to a relaxing spa weekend. There, pampered cyclists are treated to kilometre after kilometer of safe, wide, dedicated bike lanes. But that’s just the start of it. The traffic lights have sensors and change quicker when it’s raining so you don’t get wet. They even have heated bike paths so you can stay snug in icy weather. Nobody wears a hi-vis or a helmet, because why would you? You wouldn’t wear one for a massage.
Cycling in Manchester should make perfect sense, what with our flat roads and our variable (I’m being kind) public transport. But the number of journeys taken by bike in Manchester is actually pitiably small: as few as 3% of people cycle to and from work, about half as many as in inner London and way way behind Cambridge, where 25% do. Here in Manchester cycling infrastructure was ignored for decades, and today a third of journeys of less than a single kilometer are made by car. The result? Our air is poisoned. Emissions from vehicles are causing cancer, asthma, heart disease and dementia, with 2000 people in Greater Manchester dying early every year as a result of air pollution.
So we definitely need to drive less. But the fact is people just don’t feel safe cycling on our roads. In fact, in a UK wide survey, people were more afraid of cycling on Manchester streets than any other city. The official statistics show that an injury occurs only once every 249,000 miles cycled in Greater Manchester - which translates as more than 400 actual humans hurt each year. But that figure only accounts for injuries reported to the police, and in any case, is still significantly more than in cities like Bristol, Birmingham and Newcastle.
And as Katy Holliday, who regularly posts on Twitter about the poor state of the city’s cycling infrastructure, says, ‘the city centre is very bad for cycling currently - confusing and dangerous.’ She’s right: seemingly, there is no route through the city centre without getting embroiled in maze of one way streets and tram lines. It’s bad enough for those us who cycle there every day. For a visitor to the city, it must be terrifying.
And oh yes - those tram lines. They’re kryptonite to bikes: fail to approach them at the correct angle and your wheels will get caught - and then there’s nothing you can do except wait patiently to hit the floor. In fact, a 2015 survey found that no fewer 88% of cyclists had experienced an incident on the tram tracks. Groups like the Greater Manchester Cycling Campaign have long berated Metrolink and Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) for failing to design in proper bike lanes. But nothing seems to have changed; new tram routes along Cross Street and Corporation Street feature intersecting bike lanes that require the skills of a BMX champion to navigate.
But could change - and not just toxic traffic fumes - finally be in the air? Last summer the Olympic champion cyclist Chris Boardman was appointed by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and given the Soviet sounding title of 'Cycling and Walking Commissioner’. In December Commissioner Boardman unveiled his vision of Manchester: a city in which cycling is so safe and normal that a 12 year old could do it anywhere. 'It's our aspiration to show London how it should be done,' he said.
He has quite a task on his hands. After all, what would happen now if you sent your 12 year old off cycling down, say, Deansgate, to take their chances with the buses, taxis, and van drivers primed to take down vulnerable mini-remoaners? You’d probably get a call from social services, that’s what.
The good news is that there’s proof that when safe bike paths are available, people will use them. Before the early 2000's Seville, in southern Spain, had little or no cycling culture - a piddling 0.5 of journeys were made on bike. Then, almost overnight, a network of 80km of segregated lanes was put up, in the face of widespread scepticism that anyone would ever use them. But they did, in their droves - the number of trips made by bike multiplied 11-fold in just a couple of years.
But can it be done here in Manchester? Well, Boardman’s report, Made to Move, certainly conjures a vision of a cycling paradise. Fully segregated bike paths, kids happily cycling to school, air pollution levels down from ‘fatal’ to merely ‘unpleasant’ - it’s enough to bring a tear to the eye. And he reckons he can make it happen by 2028 - if he gets £1.5bn to do it, that is.
I know what you’re thinking: £1.5bn sounds like an awful lot of money. Well, that’s because it is. It could build you ten Oxford Road cycleways, every year, for ten years. Imagine that. Enough to have the residents of Groningen frothing with envy. The problem, of course, is that the money doesn’t actually exist yet. Andy Burnham’s response is an ‘aspiration’ to provide £50m a year from 2019 to 2021. All well and good. But that money - if it materialises - will account for only 10% of Boardman’s £1.5bn; the rest needs to be raised. It’s going to take the mother of all crowdfunders.
To be fair to TfGM and the council some progress has already been made. Venture out of the city centre and there are quite a few examples of good practice, even if they don’t join up. Most notably, last year saw the completion of a new segregated seven mile cycleway, running from Didsbury to the city centre along Oxford Road - and more than 5000 people a day are now riding on it. Katy Holliday, who uses it on her daily commute, says, 'It's easy to forget how bad other routes are in comparison. I hope this is the first of many.' Even the amusingly grumpy blog Mad Cycle Lanes of Manchester has to concede it’s 'better than nothing'.
I decide take a detour one morning to see how it is for myself, and I love it. It’s not perfect - you often come up against crowds of people getting off buses, and sleepy students ambling in your path, which not appeal to the lycra clad types who like to hurtle pell mell through the traffic. But for me the knowledge that I’m not going to actually die outweighs any inconvenience. At long last, central Manchester has a bike route that you can imagine actually being used by all ages, and people with disabilities. You still get soaked at traffic lights when it’s raining, though.
Even better, a second multi-million pound development is about to be launched. This one will create a new segregated cycleway running from Chorlton to the edge of the city centre - my commute! - with money also ring-fenced to bring parts of the Northern Quarter up to scratch. And this is a pre-Boardman project with the funding already secured, so it looks like that nightmare journey of mine might just be about to get a lot better.
That will still leave an awful lot to be done, and I don’t envy Boardman’s job. For one thing, he’ll have to work with the ten borough councils, which tend to be wary of any Greater Manchester-wide initiative (it’s a power thing).The biggest challenge, though, will be in transforming Manchester’s congested, dangerous city centre. Because even if the plan does get off the ground, it is bound to face plenty of opposition. Taxi drivers will take to Twitter to vent about the disruption. Local businesses will say that trade is suffering. Drivers will find their commute is taking longer, and they won’t like it. But if he succeeds? Never mind those medals - it might just be the biggest achievement of Boardman’s illustrious career.
