Cycle infrastructure: Can England fix new homes’ cycling problems?
PEDALLING IN SQUARES: Building safe cycle infrastructure, including residential connections, was the 4th most important legislative change bike shops picked to develop cycling in the UK, according to CIN’s 2024 Market Data. Laura Laker delves into the topic for CIN with Sustrans CEO Xavier Brice and investigates why England has been missing the chance to make it easier for people to cycle to and from new residential estates – and the huge opportunity to do things differently…
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Fifty new homes, built cheek-by-jowl with a traffic-free stretch of National Cycle Network, and yet, somehow, there’s no direct link between the two. Cyclist James Palser shared his bafflement on social media that half of the houses being built off Dudbridge Hill in Stroud will back directly onto the former railway line, with no access to it. Instead, anyone hoping to cycle towards Stroud or Stonebridge, off-road on NCN45, will first need to join a busy, narrow road and hustle themselves, between passing vehicles, onto a pavement with no drop kerb and a fence on it. Given the number one reason people don’t cycle is a fear of traffic, you’re effectively placing a ‘no cycling’ sign on each new home.
I’m not singling out housing association Bromford, whose media webform and Facebook page were unable to receive messages when I contacted them for a response. The fact is, there’s currently no requirement for new developments adjacent to the Network to connect to it – or for housing estates to provide cycle infrastructure at all. There’s also no connection to the path from an adjacent 1970s-era council housing estate, a cul-de-sac (though likely built before the NCN), requiring those residents to also brave the same detour first if they hope to cycle anywhere. The irony is, for all the talk of making these new homes affordable and energy-efficient, the development has failed to tackle one of those households’ biggest outgoings – transport – by effectively requiring them to own a car, despite being on the outskirts of a town with a decent railway service.
It’s not all bad news. With the government planning 1.5 million houses, part of which will be part of new ‘New Towns’, there is an opportunity to think differently about what those communities will look like, and the experience of those living in them.
Sustrans’ CEO, Xavier Brice, tells me, “we can’t build those new homes in the way we have always done them; we can’t have car dependent new housing.”
People need choices to walk and cycle, added Brice, pointing out when we build new homes and new estates, “we are baking in something for generations to come.” Get it right first time and generations can enjoy the fruits of that effort.
“Making it easy to leave the car at home delivers a better environment for everybody,” Brice says, but at the moment we aren’t getting it right.
“How we choose (or are forced) to travel, and our car-dependency is ruining our environment and contributing towards climate change. This is disproportionately affecting people from marginalised groups and those living in areas with high deprivation, particularly in inner cities.”
This is, in some ways, an England problem. In Scotland and Wales, the NCN is more seriously integrated into planning policy, seen as ‘nationally important development’ in the former, and part of planning policy in the latter, something that local authorities should assist in completing.
In England, though, the work of local planning, highway and transport teams is not always joined up. One department can undermine the other without even realising it. And so the Dudbridge Hills of the world are born. Added to that, because there’s no maintenance funding for cycle routes, there is an active disincentive for local authorities to build them – without funding allocated for their upkeep they simply become a liability.
Things are starting to shift in England, with a new vision-led planning approach by government which means local authorities should be delivering transport choice, rather than simply assuming everyone will drive and building for a growth in motor traffic. The fact is, people use what’s available and what’s easy and affordable – and often driving is not it, if there are other options.
We also need to undo car-centric thinking. While roads and rail are recorded on planning policy documents, both local and national – and notionally held within strategic plans about their future expansion and maintenance – cycleways aren’t. Incredibly for a piece of national infrastructure, sometimes council officials don’t even know the NCN is there, on their patch. Sometimes it’s invisible on maps because of arcane access rules, i.e. an off-road section is not on a public right-of-way or other public highway. It is, for practical purposes, like a pattern on a magic eye painting, only visible to those who firstly know it’s there, and secondly are able and willing to look for it. The NCN is literally absent from policy maps. And that’s before we even get into the quagmire of how difficult it is to fund and deliver connections to and from it within the existing car-centric planning system.
Things could be different. A new report by think tank Create Streets lays out principles for new homes in new towns to enable “thriving and prosperous communities”. By building in places with acute housing need that are also close to existing infrastructure like rail stations, homes can be delivered quickly, without locking in car-dependency, they say.
Create Streets’ Britain Remade report sets out various policy levers new and existing, to make active and sustainable transport the easiest option, to meet the government’s ‘vision-led’ approach. This means rather than simply predicting more car traffic and building for that, as we do now, we define the desired outcomes, i.e. more walking, cycling and public transport use, and make that the easier option. This means not building in isolated fields, but within walking and cycling distance of towns and transport links like rail stations, linking to those connections with safe, traffic-free and low traffic paths from the offset. It means using ‘gentle density’, such as terraced housing and low-rise apartments, with shops and schools and amenities built in, rather than a sprawl of smaller, individual homes, reducing the need to drive for everyday needs. The report even suggests 12 locations where existing or planned rail stations, among other things, would make this possible.
It’s safe to say, in the vast majority of cases, none of this is currently happening. Create Streets says: “All our government-led attempts to create new towns and settlements over the last 60 years have basically failed. Too few homes, too far apart & too slowly built. No real town centres, little walkability & very little public transport. Ugly civic centres that only a mother could love. On the few occasions that we’ve actually built something, they have not been towns but sprawling suburbs. ‘Car parks beside stations’ is the model not ‘new towns beside stations’. It is depressing, unsustainable and stupid.”
A damning report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), released in November, agreed that England’s new homes were ‘forcing people to rely on cars’. Public transport travel times from new homes rose in 15 years, particularly in rural areas, to over an hour to the nearest hospital, 43 minutes to the nearest secondary school, and 37 minutes to the nearest supermarket. No wonder Brits were driving 49bn extra miles a year by 2019 compared with 2000.
NEF says these problems can be solved by integrating transport and housing planning instead, releasing grey belt land and using data to decide on the best place for new homes. European nations already deliver homes beside rail stations existing or new, with cycle routes and bus services – and, it says, England is capable of catching up.
Incorporating the Network into new homes is one of Sustrans’ four key goals now, Brice says. But it will need help. Funding is scarce, particularly in rural areas – and Sustrans’ annual income dropped by a third in 2024 compared with previous years, leading to a raft of redundancies. Where Sustrans has improved links, people use them: in Buckinghamshire, an upgrade between Aylesbury Vale Parkway and Haydon Hill from dirt to tarmac, with a new bridge, has increased cycling rates by 344%, according to the charity.
We need to be smarter about how we build. An earlier report by Create Streets and Sustrans, Stepping off the Road to Nowhere, sets out ways to deliver more and better homes using less land. For example in Chippenham, instead of spending a planned £75m on a new road, the same investment could deliver bus and rail infrastructure, new walking and cycling routes, car clubs and financial support for the local high street.
In Cambridge, in the Waterbeach development, local campaigners worked with the developer to transform the way the housing was laid out. After feedback, a proposed school was moved away from a main road to the centre of the estate, meaning kids could cycle and walk to school instead of needing to be driven each day. It wasn’t easy though – it took 20 years of negotiations, something most campaigners won’t have the resources or ability to do.
Good transport links need to be integrated into how we deliver and build. If local officials refuse a development with bike paths because they see it as a maintenance liability, home builders are forced to deliver the same failed solutions, despite their best intentions. Cycle routes need to be embedded into local policy, with proper funding to deliver and maintain them – in the same way we do for roads. Active Travel England can and should oversee designs from the offset. Developments that lock in car dependency can and should firmly be a thing of the past – we can’t afford to, and we don’t need to, keep making the same mistakes.
www.sustrans.org.uk
www.createstreets.com
PICS: Images of NCN 52 near a residential area in Coventry (Credit: Mark Radford/Sustrans).