Pedal Power

Those of you who regularly read my rantings will have noticed my ongoing battle with the cycle fraternity in London. Not that I have anything against these lycra clad assassins at all. Indeed I am a leisure cyclist myself. It’s more to do with the way the lycra brigade flaunt the law and lose all semblance of common sense when using the roads and more so, the pavements of London. So understand my dilemma then as a designer of work space environments and also as a staunch campaigner for ‘pavements are for pedestrians’ to having read that cyclists are altering the way an office will have to be designed.

Amazingly its calculated that around 10,000 people cycle into the City of London each day, accounting for 15% of all traffic commuting into the area. Now, making allowance for visitors to the area, London City planners estimate that one in ten City workers cycle to the office. Now that’s all well and good and to be applauded in this day and age of overcrowded commuter trains, dirty buses and a heightened awareness of well-being but that’s an awful lot of wheels and sweaty Lycra to accommodate. The ever increasing problem being exasperated by current planning ratios falling well short of the level required and the City of London planners are understandably concerned. It is calculated that the Square Mile already needs an additional 27,000 cycle parking spaces to meet current demands.

City planners therefore intend to double the current City of London standard for cycle parking in new developments to one space per 125m² of gross office floor space. They are also reported to be working on guidance which will advise developers on designing cycle-friendly facilities in all new buildings and that will have a major affect on the design of working environments. That’s an awful lot more expensive real estate space being given over to cycle racks, showers and worryingly, smelly locker space. As these wheeled wonders prefer to locate their transport as close to their work area as possible it will inevitably lead to expanded accessible building basements and extended building cores.

According to data released by the Office for National Statistics, last year, Britons spent more than £1.5 billion buying bicycles, this being the highest level since modern records began. On top of this and as recently reported in the Times Newspaper, statistics show that the number of ‘cycle commuters rose by 14 per cent to 762,334 between 2001 and 2011’.

When you consider the potential outcome of this pedal powered revolution on the basic shape and access to buildings and look at this proposal alongside Mayor Boris J’s announcement of the creation of cycling super highways, you begin to see the dramatic affect on the entire City that these Eco friendly fiends are having. A ten year, £913 million programme of enhancements purely to encourage cycling throughout London will dramatically alter the Capital City. BJ stated that “It is also the case that it will deliver long-term benefits to the London and UK economy because it makes it a much, much nicer and more attractive place to live in and move around.” He also said, Cycle routes deliver quite a Big Bang for your buck and appeal in a cost-conscious age,” he continued, “The route along the Embankment will have a capacity for 1,000 cyclists an hour – that is the equivalent of four Tube trains and, for a comparatively extremely modest amount of money, we can unlock significant capacity on the Tube”. I however take issue with this final point on a day when it was announced that the Docklands Light Railway has lifted its ban on taking bikes on its service to enable cyclists to access areas such as Greenwich and Blackheath that are currently poorly served by existing cycle friendly routes.

“A much much nicer and more attractive place to live”? That’s sounds great. More open spaces, less heavy traffic, less noise but ultimately more opportunities to get flattened by stealth bikes approaching unlit on the wrong side of the street, more abandoned bikes chained to every conceivable structure and more unbearable holier than though cyclists. 

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