Coronavirus is expediting the trend for cities to be remade for more active travel. During lockdown, cycling has shown itself to be a resilient and sustainable form of transport, enabling key workers to travel to work while social distancing, and the lockdown population to exercise and keep fit. And as lockdown release strategies come into play, many cities are encouraging people to cycle to work, to ease pressure on the transit systems and also as a way to enable physical distancing.

While cities must look at short term measures to respond, it is evident that they must also consider medium and long term responses to support more people to cycle. The backdrop to coronavirus remains pressures that existed pre-covid: climate change and necessity to decarbonise transport and reduce pollution haven’t gone away.

Once temporary schemes are in place, cities will want to monitor their effectiveness, and then review and decide whether to make them permanent, as part of the city’s overall cycling network. At the heart of these decisions will be good data, which for cycling can be difficult to obtain the breadth of requirements until now.

How we can help:

See.Sense data can help you answer the following questions:

• How have the bike lanes been used, in terms of frequency, timing, and also by which profile groups (gender/age/type of bike user)?
• Which roads are being used to access the bike lanes - can you identify where to build modal filters (filtered permeability) to help make access easier?
• What locations are congested for cyclists and how long are people waiting at these locations, and at what time of day? These factors can impact on cyclists’ ability to physically distance.
• How can we better understand junction performance including adjusting traffic phasing to improve throughout?
• Where can you build ‘whole of route’ corridors that provide segregation and crossings so the whole route can be cycled without encountering major obstacles or having to battle with fast traffic on a busy road?
• Where to build additional cycle parking facilities at key locations, such as outside stations and in high streets, to accommodate an increase in cycling, for example by repurposing parking bays to accommodate cycle racks?
• How can I create or refresh our Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans (LCWIP)’s with new data?