There is a battle going on in central London right now which will decide its future, and perhaps the future of every other city centre in Britain. Officially, it’s about cycling – in particular, Boris Johnson’s plan for a new segregated cycle superhighway from Tower Hill to Hyde Park Corner. In reality, it is a battle about health, about noise, about pollution, about the kind of cities we want to live in – and the kind of politics we want to have.

All the political parties support the superhighway scheme. So do more than 60 big London employers, including RBS, Deloitte, Orange and Unilever. Two years ago, more than a million Londoners elected Johnson on a promise to “implement three Dutch-style cycle schemes [with] segregated bike tracks” and “complete the superhighways to Dutch standards”.

What the mayor proposes is big by cycling standards, but not that big by most other standards. It involves converting one of the four traffic lanes into a cycle track on Upper Thames Street and the Victoria Embankment, a stretch of road all of two and a half miles long. Some motorists’ journeys will take longer, but most of the delays are small and some journeys will actually be quicker. The average delay along the route at the busiest two peak hours is 1 minute 26 seconds.

Yet behind the scenes there is an intense lobbying operation to destroy the plans, led by just one company, Canary Wharf Group, and by the City of London Corporation. These opponents will not speak against the scheme in public. They know that the majority even of business opinion is not with them and they stand little chance of winning any debate held in the open. They know that they will be seen as old men in limos. They know that most Londoners, who do not drive in the centre, sympathise with making central London less car-dominated. So instead, they are trying to poison the project in secret without leaving any fingerprints.

Canary Wharf, a major donor to the Conservative Party, has heavily lobbied the mayor and his staff. A PR company employed by the group has distributed a briefing which the scheme’s supporters say contains numerous misrepresentations and errors of fact. Another business lobbyist funded by Canary Wharf has toured the party conferences claiming, wrongly, that the superhighways will delay traffic in London by 6%. As Michael Liebreich, a member of the Transport for London board, has said, this is not the way that a decision like this should be made.

The City Corporation has taken a slightly subtler approach, claiming to support the superhighways “in principle” but demanding delays to their implementation which might well, in practice, stymie them. The Corporation attacks the scheme as “heavily biased towards cycling”.

That feels a little like opposing Crossrail on the grounds that it is heavily biased towards trains – but it’s wrong anyway. It is not just cyclists who will benefit from the new routes.

The superhighway will be able to carry 3,000 people an hour. That is the equivalent of putting 10 extra trains an hour on the District and Circle Tube lines running beneath the route, at a fraction of the cost in capital works and disruption. It is the equivalent of running 41 extra buses an hour, at a fraction of the cost in roadspace and emissions.

Every extra person who cycles is freeing up space for another person on the Tube, the buses, or the roads. Every extra person who cycles is improving not just their own health, but other people’s health, because bikes do not cause pollution. Everywhere else this has been tried – London is way behind many other world cities – it has made the streets more pleasant for everyone, and more profitable places to do business. Cycling is a catalyst to change our country for the better.

Cyclists are already a quarter of the rush-hour traffic in central London. Their numbers have trebled in the last decade, while motor traffic has dropped by a fifth. We know that far more people than this want to cycle, but are put off by the lack of provision and the perception of danger. In the 19 months since Johnson announced his plans, 23 cyclists have been killed on London’s roads. Ten of those people, nearly half, died at places where the mayor is proposing to instal segregated cycle lanes or junctions.

In the end, the limo-users’ view of how London is governed, like their view of how London travels around, feels out of date. Deals behind the scenes were how it was done when the city was run by Whitehall. But under an elected mayor, the public should decide and the debates should be held in public.

Boris Johnson has shown real leadership on cycling. He is the only British politician to have matched bold words with bold actions. I do not believe he will back down in the face of such crude pressure.

Olympic champion and former world hour record holder Chris Boardman is a policy adviser for British Cycling