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The full extent of how cycling has taken over London can be revealed today.

The biggest ever census of bike use in the city reveals one in four road users during the morning rush hour is a cyclist - and on key routes such as river crossings and roundabouts bikes even outnumber all other vehicles.

The study for City Hall reveals that Theobalds Road, Holborn, is London’s busiest bike street as 64 per cent of vehicles passing along it in the morning peak are bikes, followed by Kennington Park Road, which runs between Kennington and Oval (57 per cent) and Old Street, Shoreditch (49 per cent).

At 29 of the 164 monitoring locations, cyclists made up the majority of vehicles on the road in a further sign that the 21st century bike boom is helping London close the gap on Amsterdam as a leading cycle capital.

Separate Transport for London figures already show that cyclists now make 570,000 trips in London every day compared with 290,000 trips in 2001.

Blackfriars, Waterloo and London bridges are all now among the top 10 busiest cycle streets in London. On all of these, cyclists make up 42 per cent of traffic and 15 per cent of people - though they take up just 12 per cent of road space.

Almost 9,300 riders - 11 a minute - cross London Bridge a day. Along Amsterdam’s busiest cycle route through the Rijksmuseum there is a daily frequency of 13,000.

Andrew Gilligan, London Mayor Boris Johnson's cycling commissioner, said: “These incredible, near-Dutch results show how enormous cycling already is in London and how urgent the task of catering for it has become. Cyclists may make up 24 per cent of the traffic across central London, but they still get much less than 24 per cent of policy-makers’ attention. These extraordinary figures disprove any claim that cycling is marginal and that investing in it is indulgent.”

Bikes now account for 24 per cent of all road traffic in central London during the morning peak and 16 per cent across the whole day.

Some 70 per cent of journeys are during the morning and evening peaks - more than other forms of transport - with tidal flows south to north in the morning and reversed in the evening.

Research was commissioned by Mr Johnson and the findings will help City Hall deliver the Mayor’s £1 billion cycle revolution through a more extensive cycle network.

Although the Mayor has budgeted £913 million for cycling schemes, this sum may be cut if Chancellor George Osborne makes deep inroads in TfL’s budget in the spending round next week.

Danny Williams, author of the Cyclists in the City blog, and a member of the Mayor's Roads Task Force, said: “The census shows it is already mainstream to travel to work by bike. The number of people cycling across London’s bridges has boomed over the last couple of years. The latest vehicle count was a couple of months ago when it was cold and fairly wet so I think we can assume the numbers of people cycling is even higher.

"I’m not surprised by the huge numbers of people cycling in on some routes like Theobolds Road - we’ve created an environment where many other routes just aren’t realistic on a bike because they’re either full of stationary motor vehicles or those vehicles are going too fast for most people to feel safe cycling around them.

"What is frustrating, though, is that Transport for London only counts a bicycle as equivalent to 20 per cent of a motor car when it designs roads and junctions, so it’s still failing to make these very busy bike routes work properly for people on bikes, even when they’re the dominant form of transport. I don’t think that’s acceptable any longer.”

The mayor’s “cycle vision” aims to sustain the cycling boom by increasing cyclist numbers by 400 per cent from 2001 to 2026. He wants to “delycrify” cycling, encouraging wider usage of the bike as a means of getting from A to B.

A system of Dutch-style bike lanes will be introduced in outer London from next year and the main east-to-west cycling corridor incorporating the Westway will open in 2016.

The cycle census was carried out by TfL during two weeks in April by manual counting at 164 sites in central London.

The new survey includes, for the first time, journeys within central London rather than just crossing a cordon. Under the old measure, masses of the Boris bike trips for instance were not counted because they are wholly within central London.