Boris Johnson has said temporary schemes like a proposed cycle lane over Trent Bridge should be made permanent in a bid to get more cyclists on the road.
He said more education was needed so motorists could ‘learn to coexist’ with those on bicycles.
He was speaking during a visit today, July 28, to Beeston to promote new measures to increase the use of cycling.
As part of what are currently temporary measures, Nottingham City Council plans to make one city-bound lane of Trent Bridge cycle only, with a barrier to segregate it from motorists.
They were designed to be interim measures to help with the return to work post-Covid, with fewer people able to use public transport to get about.
Other temporary schemes in Nottingham include closing Victoria Embankment to through-traffic, and rolling out the use of pop-up cycle lanes throughout the city.
Some areas outside schools could also be closed during collection times to help with socially-distanced pick ups and drop offs once schools return.
It comes after Mr Johnson yesterday launched measures designed to help people lose weight, including GPs prescribing cycling, a potential ban on buy-one-get-one-free offers in supermarkets and a ban on junk food adverts on peak time television.
Today, Mr Johnson was asked whether he would like to see the Trent Bridge scheme, and others like it, made permanent.
He said: “Yes I would, I look at some of the cycle lanes in the last 50 years, and some of them just end in a mysterious way.
“They don’t always work, I’m not going to claim every single project is a triumph, but in the end the more you do the more confident cyclists will be.
“A confident cyclist is a safe cyclist.
“It’s the people who aren’t certain what to do, who hesitate and get caught in the middle of the traffic, who worry, they are the people who will be more vulnerable.
“The confident cyclists, who know instinctively what to do, who will be the safest.
“That’s why we want more training, that’s why we want thousands of miles of protected cycle lanes, and investing in cycling generally to help people get back on their bikes.
“This is just the beginning. This has been an extraordinary summer for cycling, an extraordinary past few months, because of the pandemic, what we want to do now is make sure we bank some of those gains, put in the infrastructure to make it permanent, and give people the confidence to change their lives.
“We also want motorists to understand that as we go on we’re going to be sharing the road more and more with cyclists.
“Not every motorist necessarily loves that idea, and we’re going to have to do a lot of educating and get people to understand this is the future, and it’s a great future.
“I have sympathy for motorists, too, they feel they pay for the roads in excise and road tax and so on, and they see these cyclists who don’t pay those taxes, but actually they should be respectful, and we should learn to co-exist.”
Plans announced today including a £50 bicycle repair voucher, improvement to the national cycle network, and creating at least one zero-emission transport city centre, in a city yet to be named.
