Sometimes politics really does overlook the obvious, and there’s a fine example just now in those two great centres of clear thinking and clogged traffic, Oxford and Cambridge. Here is the problem. The country wants, and badly needs, to build on these cities’ success in tech, bioscience and other industries: 129,000 new jobs and 135,000 new homes are planned in and around them over the next decade or so. But first you have to plan how to transport all the new people, and none of the usual answers works.

Even if new roadbuilding were an answer in any city, it can’t be in these two. Their historic centres are inviolable, their electorates implacable. Gone, thank God, are the days when plans could be drawn up for a new highway through Christ Church Meadow. More buses? Both cities’ centres are already choked with them. Metros? Vastly expensive and disruptive, years to build, and couldn’t hope to serve most of the journeys people will need to make.

Yet even as Oxford and Cambridge draw up plans for light rail, busways and rapid transit networks, one far simpler, cheaper and quicker answer is staring them in the face. It is something which already epitomises both places; which, in Cambridge, already has a greater share of journeys than any other mode, and in Oxford not much less. It is, of course, the bicycle.

In a report published today for the National Infrastructure Commission, I show how cycling can become the real rapid transit network in these cities, and how – with their small distances, historic centres and ever more dispersed employment sites – they are almost perfectly suited to it.

Even excluding students and those who cycle for less than half of their total journey (for instance, to the station), 43% of work journeys entirely within Cambridge are already done by bike, the highest proportion in Britain and perhaps in the English-speaking world. For Oxford, it’s 27%.

With numbers like these, you might ask: can we really do more? Categorically yes – because those volumes have been achieved with, at least in Oxford’s case, almost no help from the authorities. One key central Oxford street is closed to bikes – while being open to buses. Oxfordshire council, the highway authority, does not have a single officer dedicated to cycling.

Cambridge is better, but has relied largely on off-road or side-street routes, which are now reaching their limits. In both places, the main roads look little or no different to those of cities where nobody cycles. Designed almost entirely for cars, the streets of Oxford and Cambridge simply do not reflect how they are actually used. And in both places, most journeys from just outside the cities, though eminently cyclable, are still made by car, because the cycling alternatives are so awful.

The problem is partly money. I recommend £200m for the necessary improvements. It’s a lot by cycling standards, but not by any other standards; the government is already spending up to five times more on just one local road project near Cambridge.

Mostly, however, it is about political will. Oxfordshire’s leader, Ian Hudspeth, impressed me as someone who genuinely wanted to do more – but the test will come in actions taken. Both cities need someone in the sort of role I held in London, and that Chris Boardman is doing in Manchester, to push things through.



Cambridge’s plans, I think, focus too much on buses, which lack the flexibility of cycling, and on the metro – cited by some as a magic alternative to politically difficult subjects like congestion charging or roadspace reduction for motors, but in fact a chimera: not realistic or deliverable for somewhere of its relatively small size. Too often, politicians are seduced into single big, glamour projects, when lots of boring, smaller ones would help far more people at far less expense.



Unlike building a metro under King’s College chapel, my recommendations are pretty simple, the mixture that has worked in London: segregated lanes on the main roads, better crossings of the ring-roads, congestion charging or some other kind of traffic reduction measures to make the roads safer where there is no room for separated lanes.



It will be interesting to see whether anything happens. One Cambridge business leader said his city had too many members of what he called the “Triple-A club: against absolutely anything.” But even without the 135,000 new homes, the status quo is untenable – and cycling is the least disruptive way to create the capacity these cities need.



Everything I recommend has already happened, years ago, in other countries. Given the head start which cycling has in Oxford and Cambridge, they are the perfect places to show how Britain, too, can make this kind of future.

