The government has wasted hundreds of millions of pounds painting pointless white lines on busy roads and calling them cycle lanes, according to Britain’s cycling and walking commissioners.

In a letter to the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, the commissioners – including the Olympic champions Chris Boardman (Greater Manchester), Dame Sarah Storey (Sheffield City region) and Will Norman (London) – say painted cycle lanes are a “gesture” and do nothing to make people feel safer on a bike. Recent studies have shown they can actually make people less safe, they argue.

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“As there are currently no national minimum safety standards for walking and cycling infrastructure, these practices can and will continue wasting public money and failing to persuade people to change their travel habits,” the letter says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bad cycle lanes. Stafford Photograph: handout

The commissioners also call for an end to car-centric transport planning and a move towards investment decisions that “account for the true cost of car use to society”. They argue that current economic appraisal models used by the Treasury to decide whether to fund a new motorway or a segregated cycle lane “do not take full account of the negative consequences of making private car use easier, nor do they take full account of the benefits of walking and cycling on our health, wellbeing and environment”.

This approach has led to “systemic undervaluation and underinvestment in sustainable transport,” they argue, and urge the Department for Transport to change its appraisal methods “to focus on efficient use of road space and total people movement, rather than being based around capacity and journey times for vehicles”.

The commissioners want local areas in England to follow Scotland’s lead and fund road danger reduction measures by retaining revenue from fixed penalty notices issued for traffic and motoring offences, including speeding, driving without insurance and failing to wear a seatbelt.

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“Significant cuts to road policing budgets have led to a dramatic reduction in operations and a marked increase in road danger and casualties. These traffic offences could be more effectively enforced, if revenue from fixed penalty notices from road offences were kept locally, and reinvested in road safety activity in the community where the offences are taking place,” the letter says.

In Scotland, 19 local authorities are reinvesting road penalty income in safety enforcement activities, public transport, car clubs, parks maintenance, and park and rides.

The commissioners, who are meeting in Manchester for their first summit on Monday, also want the government to introduce simple European-style zebra crossings on side roads, indicating pedestrian priority over cars. These are much cheaper than UK zebras, whose belisha beacons need to be wired to mains electricity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A particularly narrow cycle lane in Wigan.

Photograph: handout

The cycling champions also want the government to review guidance on walking speeds to help local authorities make the case for extending pedestrian crossing times at signalised junctions.

“It’s tragic that hundreds of millions of pounds of government money has been spent on substandard cycling and walking infrastructure,” said Boardman, who has so far received £160m of the £1.5bn he says he needs to build a safe network of cycling and walking routes across Greater Manchester. “If national government were to adopt these asks we’d be on a winning streak and could truly transform Britain’s towns and cities, not to mention massively improving air quality and health.”

Norman, who has persuaded London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, to commit a record £2.3bn to his “healthy streets” initiative, which puts people before cars, said: ‘“Where towns and cities are investing in high-quality walking and cycling infrastructure the benefits are clear – helping tackle our inactivity crisis, helping clean up our toxic air, and making our streets more welcoming places to spend time. But for people truly to reap the benefits across the UK, government policy must not continue to hold us back.”