The scheme’s creators are seeking money to fund a floating bike lane in London. But like all such ideas, it misses the point of cycling

When last year I first read about a mooted scheme to build a floating pontoon cycleway along the Thames in London, I assumed it was yet another of those design flights of fancy that would generate some speculative media coverage, boost the CVs of those involved, and then vanish.

But it seems they’re serious.

Later this week the people behind the so-called Thames Deckway will be asking the public for £250,000 in crowdfunding to develop the scheme, the first tranche in a mooted £600m project, all the finance intended to come privately.



The brainchild of David Nixon, an architect, and artist Anna Hill, the project has a shiny website detailing how the route would snake along the south side of the Thames from Battersea, just west of the centre, around 7.5 miles to Canary Wharf in the east. Mock-up images and a promotional video show a space age-looking floating pontoon with side barriers in a jaunty blue colour, with solar-powered lights above.



There would be, the website says, “embankment ramps at strategic intervals” as well as places to stop along the way, complete with refreshment kiosks. The scheme would generate all of its own energy from a combination of sun, wind and tide.



So, this is all great, isn’t it? A safe, green, traffic-free thoroughfare for bikes through the centre of a city still famously not very friendly towards the two-wheeled, despite some recent changes?



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The promotional video for the Thames Deckway project.

Sadly, no. The deckway is a classic example of the increasing trend by entirely well-meaning architects and town planners to pointlessly over-engineer solutions to cycling, to reinvent the wheel, to devise something that is not so much a solution in search of a problem as a solution that misses the entire point of the problem.

It’s worth stressing that this isn’t just about cycling in London. Such follies can happen anywhere. And the key lesson is this: getting people cycling doesn’t need to be high-tech.



Both Nixon and Hill boast backgrounds in the space and aeronautics sector, and it shows. It’s probably much more fun to computer-sketch a sun-dappled, solar-powered pontoon, rather than wade through the slightly more quotidian but well-thumbed and entirely proven Dutch or Danish design manuals for things like segregated cycle lanes, traffic calming, lower speed limits and rebuilt junctions.



The deckway isn’t the only such folly. Last year, the architect Norman Foster unveiled plans for the SkyCycle, more than 150 miles of elevated bike paths installed directly above rail lines. Then in February a design company actually won a prize for its idea of turning London’s abandoned tube tunnels into bike routes.



Like the deckway, these are useless for the same few, very basic, hugely fundamental reasons.



To begin with, they’re not convenient. The deckway people decided they didn’t want to chat to me before the launch of the funding drive later this week, and it remains unclear how many entry/exit points there would be, let alone how these would not become a bit steep to ride along at low tide.



But even if they were positioned, say, every half a mile, this still leaves cyclists having to potentially go out of their way to join a slightly meandering river-based bike route before then having to possibly travel an extra distance to get to their destination. It’s a car-oriented system imposed on cycling.



This becomes even more restrictive when you consider that the deckway would also charge riders a toll of something like £1.50 per trip. Even with, say, an Oyster-style tap-in charging system, that could bring more delays.



But the biggest problem of the deckway, the SkyCycle, the tunnels, and all similar schemes is this: one of the main points of encouraging more cycling in a city is to make it more people-friendly. Do it well enough and streets become liberated from speeding, one-tonne metal boxes. In their place come slower-moving bikes, their users unprotected, no longer cocooned from everyone else, obviously human.



These people on bikes are able to take direct or indirect routes, stop and lock up their machines where and as they choose, and go to cafes or shops – one of the main reasons that a switch from four wheels to two tends to boost businesses along bike lanes.



There can be more to it. Sometimes cyclists do like to travel more quickly along direct routes, especially when they’re going to or from work. The Dutch and Danes have in recent years begun to introduce such longer commuter links alongside existing bike networks. The new under-construction cycle superhighways in London partly follow this model.

But even these schemes rarely try to isolate cyclists, hide them away on the river, underground, in water, allowing the grown-up business of driving cars and trucks to carry on along the roads. Of course, there’s no reason why you can’t have both the deckway and still make the roads more bike-friendly, but at best it’s a mixed message.



I also worry that the deckway scheme is a bit muddled. The website seems to bill it as part commuter utility, part tourist attraction, with plans for a fleet of family-friendly rental bikes. Commuters, it says, will “only will use it during rush hours”. If that’s going to be a rule (the company’s press office didn’t respond to my question on this) it makes the scheme even more seemingly limited.



I’d also question the funding model, whether the company can really raise £600m and if so how it would be repaid. It feels more and more like a watery version of London’s infamous and under-populated cable car.



I don’t wish to be too mean to Nixon, Hill and their supporters. And yet I think they’re fundamentally misguided. For all the very 21st-century feel of the scheme, it’s arguably quite anachronistic, reminiscent of the era half a century ago when urban planners were busy carving up cities with ringroads, flyovers and gyratory systems. The deckway has the same, misguided focus on big, shiny, clever things, rather than on people.

Making a city more bike-friendly is less glamorous, more bits-and-pieces, more fundamentally simple. It takes 20 or 30 years of incremental changes and sustained political will. That doesn’t seem to be happening yet the UK – depressingly the government is now rowing back on even it’s paltry funding commitments for cycling – but I don’t think a toll track along the Thames, or lanes in the sky or underground, offer any more of a solution.



Note:

I’ve retrospectively amended the third-last paragraph to remove a reference to how long it would potentially take for the tolls to repay the project cost, as I miscounted the number of zeros and got the calculation completely wrong.