Mobility Wars
By: Robin Howie
Tags: Cycling, Mobility, Design Thinking, City Planning, Mobility Of The Future

Mobility Wars

As we cautiously emerge out of our Covid-19 lockdowns the challenge at hand is to limit the risks that come with crowded public transport.

Amidst the terrible impact of Covid-19 and all of the grief, anxiety and the uncertainty, there has been some positive news… It’s been well reported that the measures to tackle the coronavirus pandemic have led to a huge drop in air pollution. In parts of the UK, we have seen a drop in air pollution by up to 60%. Sixty!!!

The stars have aligned and demand for cycling has rocketed. Each week we are seeing more positive news that helps us imagine our cities roads a little less car-centric.

Bike shops have seen a huge spike in trade; old bikes are being brought in for repair and new bikes are selling out before they’ve even arrived at the shop (let alone been built).

One of the memories I will fondly recall of life in lockdown was passing by a small independent repair workshop in my neighbourhood … it’s not a glamorous or trendy affair, just a hole-in-the-wall workshop on a back street. To be honest, it typically looks closed or through an ajar door, you can see a lone man working on repairs with a cat for company… mid lockdown I passed by and the operation had spilt out onto the whole street with a small team of mechanics all quickly working to get bikes put into working order, customers patiently working in a socially distanced arc around the action, it was an incredibly heartwarming and inspiring sight to see.

What’s heartening is that it’s not just a resurgence at a grassroots community level… there are really positive signs that these are changes that are being deployed to help with social distancing but stand a chance of lasting as a longterm vision for urban mobility that puts wellbeing first.

Councils have been remarkably agile to deploy measures that make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Last month the UK government announced plans to invest £250m boosting cycle infrastructure. A couple of weeks later the Mayor of London announced a rather huge chunk of central London will remain car-free for the foreseeable future.

As dark as the last few months have been I will admit I have found a little joy in seeing a little parallel universe bubbling to the surface where inside London you can hear birdsong, where the city has cleaner air, where people are seizing the spaces outside of their homes and making them into defacto gyms and public spaces and of course… there is a real joy in the roads having less cars and more people safely cycling.

We can encourage and design for this positive momentum to keep building However I think we might need a different model to the one that is already at play.

Mobility Wars: An urban battleground

What I want to reflect on for a little while is the space that sits adjacent to citizens resurrecting their old flat-tired dusty bikes, or the city-dwellers flocking to buy new bikes… For the last few years, London has been a battleground of Mobility Wars. Leagues of dockless-bike-hire startups have come and gone… a floating infrastructure that whilst we sleep is redeployed wherever the data suggests that the floating fleets could be most profitable… The startups do this whilst operating within the parameters that each borough permits each different startup to operate in.