Andrew Gilligan is a former transport adviser to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, and in Downing Street
If there’s one lesson from the last government everyone can agree on, it’s this: don’t make promises you can’t keep. That was what flashed through my head when I read Nick Biskinis’s proposal to unblock the streets of London and speed up the buses by tearing out bike lanes and low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs).
We certainly could do this. But it would make very little difference to congestion or bus delay. That’s because it’s not the cause of it. There are about 2000 miles of bus-served road in London, of which around 20 miles – 1 per cent – have segregated bike lanes. So that cannot be a major reason why buses are slower.
Bike provision varies enormously in London: some boroughs have done a lot, most have done little or nothing. Taking the changes in congestion and bus speeds by borough, there is simply no relationship between them and the presence or absence of bike schemes.
Some of the boroughs with the most new bike lanes or LTNs, such as Camden and the City, have seen among the lowest falls in bus speeds. Some which have done almost nothing, such as Wandsworth and Hillingdon, have seen among the highest falls in bus speeds. There are good and bad performers in both camps, to be fair: that’s why I say there’s no relationship.
If we actually want to reduce congestion, we have to tackle the real causes of it, which are the same as they always were: traffic, parking, and roadworks. Bike-haters point out that congestion has risen even though motor traffic miles in London are about the same as they were ten years ago.
But the rise of the delivery van and SUVs – now 60 per cent of new car sales – means that motor vehicles are bigger and wider, taking up more space.The borough of Kensington is the large SUV capital of Britain – which helps explain why it has such terrible traffic, despite almost zero bike provision.
Many of my fellow Tories sincerely hate bike schemes, and our friends sincerely hate these schemes, and road changes create enormous noise on social media. But none of that means they are vote losers with the general public.
A report commissioned by Mark Harper, the last Transport Secretary but two (ministerial churn isn’t just a Tory problem) found two-thirds of people who expressed a view supported the schemes – and that for all the talk of divided communities, 58 per cent of those in LTNs didn’t even realise they lived in one.
2024 was only the latest of half a dozen elections – parliamentary, mayoral, and local – where campaigning against traffic restrictions has failed for the Conservatives. In the London mayoral campaign of 2021, a good year for us, we underperformed significantly in most wards where we opposed cycle schemes.
In Chiswick, our candidate, Shaun Bailey, campaigned strongly against a new bike lane installed by Sadiq Khan and the local Labour council, Hounslow – with visits, literature, and a Facebook video. In Hounslow as a whole, the Tory first preference vote rose by 1.2 points on the previous mayoral election, and Khan’s vote dropped 4.4 points. But in the three (normally strongly Tory) Chiswick wards, it was the Conservative vote that fell, by 10 to 12 points, and Khan’s vote which rose, by 4.4 points.
The 2022 borough elections were similar. In Dulwich Village, a Tory ward until 2018, we campaigned against a new LTN. It was not a good night for Conservatives anywhere, but it was worse in Dulwich Village, with a fall of around 6 points, against a borough-wide drop of less than 1 point.
Perhaps that was the lucky people inside the LTN. What about the wards immediately around it, suffering displacement of the traffic that once went through? In one of those, Dulwich Wood, the Tories did achieve a better-than-average result – but there was no such effect in the other three.
What usually (not always) happens is that through traffic is indeed displaced at the start, but after a few months traffic around the LTN also falls as fewer people make short local journeys by car. Traffic isn’t like water running downhill, where if you block one route, it finds the next easiest. It’s the product of people’s choices. If you make it easier and nicer not to drive, fewer people will drive.
That’s why these things usually (again, not always) go through a controversy-acceptance cycle: opposition at the start, if often from a minority, which disappears after a year or two. Uxbridge, whose 2023 by-election marked the sole success of our party’s campaign against traffic restrictions, went Labour this year as the controversy-acceptance cycle reached its later stages.
None of this is to say that every single scheme works, or is perfect, or should stay in. None of it means the same approach is right everywhere. Outer London is different from the inner city, where public transport is good, the vast majority of journeys are not made by car and most people do not even own cars.
And none of this is to say that the schemes that do work and do stay in – the majority – have no drawbacks for anyone. They do. Almost all policies do. Very few policies leave everyone 100 per cent happy.
We’ve always accepted that in this party. Rescuing Britain in the 1980s would have been impossible without accepting it. But one of the reasons the country is now stagnating again is the growing impossibility of tackling its core problems, of making any kind of change that annoys or upsets anyone.
The traffic schemes we did in London under Boris Johnson did annoy and upset some people. But they were an attempt to tackle a core problem: the capital’s inexorably growing, economy-choking demand for roadspace.
There are only four ways to do that. You can build more roads, which in most of London is physically and politically impossible. You can build more railways, which are vastly expensive, take decades, and only serve parts of the city. You can charge for using roads. Or you can do what we did, making better use of the roads you’ve already got by encouraging forms of transport, like buses and bikes, which take up less space per passenger.
I agree that thanks to the uselessness of Sadiq Khan, London’s buses and roads have been in decline. Roadworks aren’t properly coordinated, restrictions aren’t enforced, and strategic thinking is absent, with no new bus lanes for years.
So better management and planning can do a lot. But the growth of SUVs and vans, and the fact that electric vehicles are almost untaxed, means that in the end, we’ll need road charging. That would, as my think-tank Policy Exchange has found, cost most people less than they are paying in fuel duty now. Some would pay more, but a properly designed scheme would give the economy a huge boost by cutting congestion.
I don’t mind if you think that’s un-Conservative – and you’d rather live with traffic and stagnation instead. But it’s an abdication of responsibility. In the end, we have to be about solving problems and governing seriously, not just pretending there are easy answers.
And the voters? They backed Johnson, the only Tory to have won a London-wide vote in the last 30 years. And the polls show they would have re-elected him in 2016 if he had stood again, bike lanes and all.
Andrew Gilligan is a former transport adviser to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, and in Downing Street
If there’s one lesson from the last government everyone can agree on, it’s this: don’t make promises you can’t keep. That was what flashed through my head when I read Nick Biskinis’s proposal to unblock the streets of London and speed up the buses by tearing out bike lanes and low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs).
We certainly could do this. But it would make very little difference to congestion or bus delay. That’s because it’s not the cause of it. There are about 2000 miles of bus-served road in London, of which around 20 miles – 1 per cent – have segregated bike lanes. So that cannot be a major reason why buses are slower.
Bike provision varies enormously in London: some boroughs have done a lot, most have done little or nothing. Taking the changes in congestion and bus speeds by borough, there is simply no relationship between them and the presence or absence of bike schemes.
Some of the boroughs with the most new bike lanes or LTNs, such as Camden and the City, have seen among the lowest falls in bus speeds. Some which have done almost nothing, such as Wandsworth and Hillingdon, have seen among the highest falls in bus speeds. There are good and bad performers in both camps, to be fair: that’s why I say there’s no relationship.
If we actually want to reduce congestion, we have to tackle the real causes of it, which are the same as they always were: traffic, parking, and roadworks. Bike-haters point out that congestion has risen even though motor traffic miles in London are about the same as they were ten years ago.
But the rise of the delivery van and SUVs – now 60 per cent of new car sales – means that motor vehicles are bigger and wider, taking up more space.The borough of Kensington is the large SUV capital of Britain – which helps explain why it has such terrible traffic, despite almost zero bike provision.
Many of my fellow Tories sincerely hate bike schemes, and our friends sincerely hate these schemes, and road changes create enormous noise on social media. But none of that means they are vote losers with the general public.
A report commissioned by Mark Harper, the last Transport Secretary but two (ministerial churn isn’t just a Tory problem) found two-thirds of people who expressed a view supported the schemes – and that for all the talk of divided communities, 58 per cent of those in LTNs didn’t even realise they lived in one.
2024 was only the latest of half a dozen elections – parliamentary, mayoral, and local – where campaigning against traffic restrictions has failed for the Conservatives. In the London mayoral campaign of 2021, a good year for us, we underperformed significantly in most wards where we opposed cycle schemes.
In Chiswick, our candidate, Shaun Bailey, campaigned strongly against a new bike lane installed by Sadiq Khan and the local Labour council, Hounslow – with visits, literature, and a Facebook video. In Hounslow as a whole, the Tory first preference vote rose by 1.2 points on the previous mayoral election, and Khan’s vote dropped 4.4 points. But in the three (normally strongly Tory) Chiswick wards, it was the Conservative vote that fell, by 10 to 12 points, and Khan’s vote which rose, by 4.4 points.
The 2022 borough elections were similar. In Dulwich Village, a Tory ward until 2018, we campaigned against a new LTN. It was not a good night for Conservatives anywhere, but it was worse in Dulwich Village, with a fall of around 6 points, against a borough-wide drop of less than 1 point.
Perhaps that was the lucky people inside the LTN. What about the wards immediately around it, suffering displacement of the traffic that once went through? In one of those, Dulwich Wood, the Tories did achieve a better-than-average result – but there was no such effect in the other three.
What usually (not always) happens is that through traffic is indeed displaced at the start, but after a few months traffic around the LTN also falls as fewer people make short local journeys by car. Traffic isn’t like water running downhill, where if you block one route, it finds the next easiest. It’s the product of people’s choices. If you make it easier and nicer not to drive, fewer people will drive.
That’s why these things usually (again, not always) go through a controversy-acceptance cycle: opposition at the start, if often from a minority, which disappears after a year or two. Uxbridge, whose 2023 by-election marked the sole success of our party’s campaign against traffic restrictions, went Labour this year as the controversy-acceptance cycle reached its later stages.
None of this is to say that every single scheme works, or is perfect, or should stay in. None of it means the same approach is right everywhere. Outer London is different from the inner city, where public transport is good, the vast majority of journeys are not made by car and most people do not even own cars.
And none of this is to say that the schemes that do work and do stay in – the majority – have no drawbacks for anyone. They do. Almost all policies do. Very few policies leave everyone 100 per cent happy.
We’ve always accepted that in this party. Rescuing Britain in the 1980s would have been impossible without accepting it. But one of the reasons the country is now stagnating again is the growing impossibility of tackling its core problems, of making any kind of change that annoys or upsets anyone.
The traffic schemes we did in London under Boris Johnson did annoy and upset some people. But they were an attempt to tackle a core problem: the capital’s inexorably growing, economy-choking demand for roadspace.
There are only four ways to do that. You can build more roads, which in most of London is physically and politically impossible. You can build more railways, which are vastly expensive, take decades, and only serve parts of the city. You can charge for using roads. Or you can do what we did, making better use of the roads you’ve already got by encouraging forms of transport, like buses and bikes, which take up less space per passenger.
I agree that thanks to the uselessness of Sadiq Khan, London’s buses and roads have been in decline. Roadworks aren’t properly coordinated, restrictions aren’t enforced, and strategic thinking is absent, with no new bus lanes for years.
So better management and planning can do a lot. But the growth of SUVs and vans, and the fact that electric vehicles are almost untaxed, means that in the end, we’ll need road charging. That would, as my think-tank Policy Exchange has found, cost most people less than they are paying in fuel duty now. Some would pay more, but a properly designed scheme would give the economy a huge boost by cutting congestion.
I don’t mind if you think that’s un-Conservative – and you’d rather live with traffic and stagnation instead. But it’s an abdication of responsibility. In the end, we have to be about solving problems and governing seriously, not just pretending there are easy answers.
And the voters? They backed Johnson, the only Tory to have won a London-wide vote in the last 30 years. And the polls show they would have re-elected him in 2016 if he had stood again, bike lanes and all.