Travel Attitudes study

[Cugel]

That's a good theory. Well, it’s a good story. ...... Well ...... more of a neat bit of made-up-stuff

Actually, it’s a bit of well-attested stuff coming from the understanding built-up by evolutionary anthropologists, who have studied, among other things, how remaining hunter-gather and subsistence-farmer populations obtain and use calories.

But, of course, if you don’t want to believe it, you don’t have to.

as a sort of PS: can anyone think of any other animal that does anything other than choose the easiest, least physically demanding, option when alternatives are open? Many animals have a tendency to expend a lot of effort trying to attract mating partners, but presumably they don’t get to propagate their genes if they get lazy on that front, but when it comes to things like finding food, or avoiding predators, even to migrating, isn’t economy of effort perfectly usual?

I feel you missed my point, possibly because I expressed it with insufficient clarity.

The notion that hunter gatherer humans who evolved over a long period to not waste energy when pursuing the needs to survive is hardly controversial as this is the mode of more or less every living organism. But what you seem to be positing is that modern humans are lazy (a very modern concept, perhaps) in response to this built-in condition of not wasting energy when pursuing the needs of survival.

There are two issues with this notion.

One is that many modern humans are far from lazy and in fact tend to the opposite, striving madly at all sorts of things, from job careers to riding a bike fast and far. Much of this has little to do with survival needs.

The second issue is that laziness is not the same thing as avoiding unnecessary work or effort in pursuing survival. Moreover, pursuing survival in the modern world doesn't require a huge expenditure of energy, even if you do go to the shops on your bike rather than in your car.

There is actually a third issue: being inactive when one has enough in the hunter's larder to survive for the foreseeable future does not, as far as I'm aware, force humans to be lazy or even just inactive. After all, hunter gatherers need to stay fit and able. Do those few still living in such conditions not also pursue active modes for pleasure and to serve their need to stay ready for the next hunt? Do they all just sit about dozing and getting feeble?

Perhaps we can ask an evolutionary anthropologist ..... although I suspect that what they will answer will consist mostly of theory and have very little basis in experience. After all, the past doesn't exist. We only have the present containing the surviving artefacts from the past. There are only a very, very few artefacts from hunter-gatherer times and no writings at all, so "made-up-stuff" seems to be needed by the anthropologists to fill the vast evidence-gaps. This may be "educated guesses" but even the education itself seems largely based on .... other guesses.

[pwa]

Haha
60% of people are lying through their teeth...
I've just had a chat with my son (so 2010 less people than the survey). For him, the biggest barrier to cycling is going out into the back garden unlocking the shed and rear access, going back into the garden/house to lock everything back up and then doing it all again on return.
I knew exactly what he means, but I have a higher bar of c.b.a , so will get on a bike for most local shopping/errands. My wife never cycles, and I don't think there's a level of road safety that would get her out of a car.
Road safety (a market town with very little cycling infrastructure) doesn't come into my son's radar at all.
I think different versions of "can't be *rsed" figure very highly in non-cycling. But who wants to say that? Or even admit it to themselves?
Now, we all love anecdotal evidence, but I know a decent number of people and I think my own little vignette is nearer the truth than this survey. Hey ho.

Yes, I think you are right. I know folk who have bought exercise machines, thinking that they will then exercise every day and get that perfect physique they always wanted. But when it comes to it, they really can't be bothered. It is one thing to say "If this or that condition is met I will cycle everywhere", but it is something else to actually do that, when it's cold or wet, or when you are tired. So I believe a lot of people who say they would cycle if conditions were improved are just kidding themselves.

[Nearholmer]

But what you seem to be positing is that modern humans are lazy (a very modern concept, perhaps) in response to this

You’d better read what I wrote again, a bit more carefully this time, because what I talked about was a predisposition to economise on effort, and that being now being labelled “laziness”.

The word “lazy” is freighted with value judgements, which get in the way of the point, which is that an animal evolved to economise on effort is not going to opt for an effortful way of achieving something, when an effortless one is on offer. A cow will eat what’s at its feet if it’s good grass, it won’t opt to plod the extra five miles over the hill to eat very similar grass.

No more will a person opt to walk or cycle to the shop a mile away if they can get there by car, especially if it’s up a steep hill or the weather is dire, unless there’s something in it for them that makes the effort worthwhile. Why should they? They’d be daft to expend effort to no useful purpose.

Now, you and I know that there is almost always “something in it for them”, be it personal fitness and a healthier life, the joy that comes from being out in the fresh air, staving-off the day of climate disaster by not emitting so much pollution, making their neighbourhood a nicer place to live by reducing car traffic on the road, or any one of several other positives. But a very high proportion of people either don’t see those positives at all, or sort-of see them a bit, but don’t value them much, so they regards choosing to walk or cycle, rather than drive to the shop as pretty much always pointless hard work. They might do it in the summer, when it’s really nice out, but even then not if it might involve the hard work of lugging stuff back. People can’t be @rsed, because a very high proportion can’t see why they should be @rsed.

So, if you want people to engage in active travel, there are three ways forward, probably best operated simultaneously:

- make it (paradoxically) as effortless as possible (remove “blockers” like the absence of infrastructure, essentially);

- help people to internalise the positives of doing it, so that they really, genuinely believe that it serves a purpose that is useful to them; and,

- remove the effortless options.

It’s very similar to getting people to stop smoking, or stop boozing to excess. Get them to really believe it’s bad (in this case good) for them, and make the fags or booze ever less obtainable (put the prices up, ban advertising, tighten licensing laws, confine it to designated places, eventually ban it altogether).

Active travel isn’t happening as much as is desirable now, because: initiatives to make it easy are at best half-hearted; the message about the benefits is muted, it comes from dull but worthy bods like health professionals, and is often drowned-out by other messages (lifestyle-based car advertising for instance); and, because nobody, but nobody dare grasp the nettle of even gradually removing the less effortful options.

We are simply hard-wired by evolution to do two things that are really bad for us when in an environment where calories are easy to come by: economise on effort, and store fat in readiness for impending famine. Some people buck those evolutionary issues because they’ve seriously internalised the benefits of doing so, but a high proportion of people don’t, because they haven’t, and even many of those that do buck the baggage are driven by very personal benefits, not societal ones, so they’ll drive the car to join a park run, get their shopping done quick using the car, so they they can be in time for the club 80k bike ride. Extra travel, rather than active travel.

And no, “off duty” hunter-gatherers don’t engage in fitness exercises to make them better hunters, they have a rest, or dance, and the same applies to subsistence farmers. Work, rest, and dance (sounds like an old Mars Bar advert). The anthropologists are still scratching their heads a bit about the dancing, into which people throw impressive amounts of hard-won calories, and so far think that the useful function of it is around social bonding (plus the mating game, of course).

[drossall]

Haha
60% of people are lying through their teeth...
I've just had a chat with my son (so 2010 less people than the survey). For him, the biggest barrier to cycling is going out into the back garden unlocking the shed and rear access, going back into the garden/house to lock everything back up and then doing it all again on return.
I knew exactly what he means, but I have a higher bar of c.b.a , so will get on a bike for most local shopping/errands. My wife never cycles, and I don't think there's a level of road safety that would get her out of a car.
Road safety (a market town with very little cycling infrastructure) doesn't come into my son's radar at all.
I think different versions of "can't be *rsed" figure very highly in non-cycling. But who wants to say that? Or even admit it to themselves?
Now, we all love anecdotal evidence, but I know a decent number of people and I think my own little vignette is nearer the truth than this survey. Hey ho.

I sympathise with this. I've been a club rider all my life, and used bikes for commuting and utility. But I've gone through phases when I did and didn't do the utility side. It was a habit thing. You get into the habit of getting a bike out, or walking, or driving, for what for me are relatively short trips into town (1.5 miles). So if I can take the car because that's what I'm in the habit of doing, how much more people who do not regularly ride at all? Now I'm known as the guy who always turns up on a bike, even though it was not always like that.

And yes, getting a bike out takes longer than sitting in a car and turning the ignition. Especially by the time you've found the lock, bags and clothing, unlocked the garage or shed, and so on.

[Cugel]

But what you seem to be positing is that modern humans are lazy (a very modern concept, perhaps) in response to this

You’d better read what I wrote again, a bit more carefully this time, because what I talked about was a predisposition to economise on effort, and that being now being labelled “laziness”.

The word “lazy” is freighted with value judgements, which get in the way of the point, which is that an animal evolved to economise on effort is not going to opt for an effortful way of achieving something, when an effortless one is on offer. A cow will eat what’s at its feet if it’s good grass, it won’t opt to plod the extra five miles over the hill to eat very similar grass.

No more will a person opt to walk or cycle to the shop a mile away if they can get there by car, especially if it’s up a steep hill or the weather is dire, unless there’s something in it for them that makes the effort worthwhile. Why should they? They’d be daft to expend effort to no useful purpose.

Now, you and I know that there is almost always “something in it for them”, be it personal fitness and a healthier life, the joy that comes from being out in the fresh air, staving-off the day of climate disaster by not emitting so much pollution, making their neighbourhood a nicer place to live by reducing car traffic on the road, or any one of several other positives. But a very high proportion of people either don’t see those positives at all, or sort-of see them a bit, but don’t value them much, so they regards choosing to walk or cycle, rather than drive to the shop as pretty much always pointless hard work. They might do it in the summer, when it’s really nice out, but even then not if it might involve the hard work of lugging stuff back. People can’t be @rsed, because a very high proportion can’t see why they should be @rsed.

So, if you want people to engage in active travel, there are three ways forward, probably best operated simultaneously:

- make it (paradoxically) as effortless as possible (remove “blockers” like the absence of infrastructure, essentially);

- help people to internalise the positives of doing it, so that they really, genuinely believe that it serves a purpose that is useful to them; and,

- remove the effortless options.

It’s very similar to getting people to stop smoking, or stop boozing to excess. Get them to really believe it’s bad (in this case good) for them, and make the fags or booze ever less obtainable (put the prices up, ban advertising, tighten licensing laws, confine it to designated places, eventually ban it altogether).

Active travel isn’t happening as much as is desirable now, because: initiatives to make it easy are at best half-hearted; the message about the benefits is muted, it comes from dull but worthy bods like health professionals, and is often drowned-out by other messages (lifestyle-based car advertising for instance); and, because nobody, but nobody dare grasp the nettle of even gradually removing the less effortful options.

We are simply hard-wired by evolution to do two things that are really bad for us when in an environment where calories are easy to come by: economise on effort, and store fat in readiness for impending famine. Some people buck those evolutionary issues because they’ve seriously internalised the benefits of doing so, but a high proportion of people don’t, because they haven’t, and even many of those that do buck the baggage are driven by very personal benefits, not societal ones, so they’ll drive the car to join a park run, get their shopping done quick using the car, so they they can be in time for the club 80k bike ride. Extra travel, rather than active travel.

And no, “off duty” hunter-gatherers don’t engage in fitness exercises to make them better hunters, they have a rest, or dance, and the same applies to subsistence farmers. Work, rest, and dance (sounds like an old Mars Bar advert). The anthropologists are still scratching their heads a bit about the dancing, into which people throw impressive amounts of hard-won calories, and so far think that the useful function of it is around social bonding (plus the mating game, of course).

That's an awful lot of words to state what's at bottom is just the opinion that all people are inherently lazy. But look about you - they're not, only some are lazy, others the opposite and many in between. The laziness or lack of it is largely driven by memetics (cultural beliefs and expectations) not just genetics.

The hunter-gatherer hard wired for doing the least is a red herring. Humans, especially the modern variety, are motivated to expend a great deal of energy on activities that are nothing to do with survival. Others like to make even their survival activities harder than they need be in modernity out of all sorts of beliefs and motives that, it seems, directly contradict what you're claiming as a basic instinct to not be energetic unless one's life depends on it.

This anthropological guess is just another example of the desire to simplify human nature down to a few universal traits that everyone has - or ought to have, in the view of the anthropologist over attached to their theory-guesses.

************
One view of history is that its essentially about human actions and the attempt to understand them by imagining the mindset of those who made the various historical acts. There are difficulties with this. One, the past is a foreign country with mindsets obscure to our own modern minsets. Two, the full detail of the acts the historian is trying to understand by a near impossible empathetic attempt are themselves obscured by time.

Much the same can be said about attempts to understand our behaviors now and in the past via genetics. There is no simple genetic schema which contains hard-wired and unequivocal traits of behaviour. "I think you'll find its more complicated than that".

[Nearholmer]

Your proposition seems to be that we are unique among all the creatures on the earth, in that we have no evolved predisposition to economise on effort, and that any tendency individuals might have to economise on effort is because they’ve learned to do so from ideas in general circulation (aka memes).

In short, no nature, all nurture.

Have I understood you correctly?

Because if I have, I don’t buy it.

Even the youngest child if given a task will look for ways of completing it with minimum effort, and get joy from acquiring the knack - once they’ve worked out that the way to get a star-shaped block into a box is through a star-shaped aperture, aligned correctly, that’s the way they’ll do it, they’ll give up trying to shove it through the square hole that’s just too small, or trying to shove it in sideways, because they quickly learn that’s a waste of effort. Nobody teaches them that wasting effort is A Bad Thing; they just don’t want to waste effort. Why would they?

And, all the time people think riding a bike to the shops instead of going in the car is a waste of effort, that it is hard work that achieves nothing useful, they will go in the car.

So yes, ideas in general circulation are important in all this, they inform people’s judgements about whether choosing the bike over the car achieves something useful or not, but they aren’t the be all and end all, there’s the natural predisposition to economise on effort at work too.

When people are buzzing about being active, it’s because they believe that doing so will achieve something useful to them - they might be labouring under a delusion served to them by a wonky idea in general circulation, or they might be right, but the second they start to suspect that all their buzzing about is not achieving anything useful to them, economy of effort kicks in, and the buzzing about slows gradually to a halt. They loose their motivation and the predisposition to economy of effort takes over.

[Cugel]

Your proposition seems to be that we are unique among all the creatures on the earth, in that we have no evolved predisposition to economise on effort, and that any tendency individuals might have to economise on effort is because they’ve learned to do so from ideas in general circulation (aka memes).

In short, no nature, all nurture.

Have I understood you correctly?

Not at all.

My suggestion to you is that human behaviours are motivated by a vast number of genetic predispositions mediated by a vast number of memetic inclinations installed via the various cultures in which humans are immersed. To select one genetic trait (wanting to be energy-efficient when hunting) as the sole motivation governing every other human behaviour is simplistic in the extreme. It's also very easily falsifiable by observing any group of humans and their various behaviours.

Even the youngest child if given a task will look for ways of completing it with minimum effort, and get joy from acquiring the knack - once they’ve worked out that the way to get a star-shaped block into a box is through a star-shaped aperture, aligned correctly, that’s the way they’ll do it, they’ll give up trying to shove it through the square hole that’s just too small, or trying to shove it in sideways, because they quickly learn that’s a waste of effort. Nobody teaches them that wasting effort is A Bad Thing; they just don’t want to waste effort. Why would they?

And, all the time people think riding a bike to the shops instead of going in the car is a waste of effort, that it is hard work that achieves nothing useful, they will go in the car.

Your example just underlines how utterly simplistic this "lazy = energy efficient" notion is. Are you seriously arguing that the activity of putting shapes in holes explains the entire gamut of human behaviours including things as complicated as personal transport choices in the enormous complexities of the of the physical and metaphysical modern world?

So yes, ideas in general circulation are important in all this, they inform people’s judgements about whether choosing the bike over the car achieves something useful or not, but they aren’t the be all and end all, there’s the natural predisposition to economise on effort at work too.

When people are buzzing about being active, it’s because they believe that doing so will achieve something useful to them - they might be labouring under a delusion served to them by a wonky idea in general circulation, or they might be right, but the second they start to suspect that all their buzzing about is not achieving anything useful to them, economy of effort kicks in, and the buzzing about slows gradually to a halt. They loose their motivation and the predisposition to economy of effort takes over.

So .... every single human activity is put through some sort of genetic test based on "economy of effort"? Well, I've never come across a single human that actually does that, not least because its impossible in our complex existence to set parameters for measuring such economies of effort, let alone for forming clear and unambiguous intents for one's efforts.

In practice we humans lurch about expending enormous amounts of energy (our own and that bought from the economy) on all sorts of efforts that have no clear, simple, unambiguous and utterly focussed intent except in very rare cases. We are creatures of habit and the habits can be permed from an enormous number of genetic and memetic drivers.

***************
But let's return to the issue: why do most people choose a car over a bike for personal transport?

Some may well be physically lazy but also physically inept so incapable of riding a bike. Many love the car for it amplification of personal power and its status, the speed, the pretty engineering or some other appealing aspect of the design and function. Most use a car because "that's what everyone does", its expected of them or they feel safer in a metal cocoon. Etc.

Many modern humans are physically inept and can't get over their fear of trying something like cycling. Others are afraid of traffic because they're told they should be. Many want to cycle but feel that this would reduce their status in the eyes of others. Etc..

But mostly, people have been tutored to think that the car is better than the bike, without really knowing why that might be; or if it really is the case. In fact, from the point of view of economy of effort, cycling saves a huge amount compared to a car as you don't have to do enormous amounts of work to be able to afford a car and all its ongoing associated costs!

So - your argument about lazy non-cyclist = effort economiser doesn't even hold on your own proposition that economising effort trumps every other human motive.

[Nearholmer]

In practice we humans lurch about expending enormous amounts of energy (our own and that bought from the economy) on all sorts of efforts that have no clear, simple, unambiguous and utterly focussed intent

Who said it had to be clear, simple etc?

The motivations are as many varied, and complicated as our brains can accommodate or cook-up, but without motivation, a belief that we will “get something out of it”, a something which might range from “lunch” to “social approbation” and well beyond, we will cease to lurch about expending energy in that direction, and default to economising effort.

From what I can see of our debate, the only difference between our views is that I believe that for good evolutionary reasons people tend to default to economising effort when not motivated to do otherwise, and you ….. well, I’m not totally sure ….. do you believe that people don’t default to economising on effort in the absence of motivation to do otherwise? Do you believe that the default state of people is to be highly physically active in the absence of motivation to be so, and that ideas in general circulation suppress that behaviour?

My take is that this is important in this context, because if you ignore, or deny the existence of, the predisposition to economise effort, then attempts to move people in large numbers from inactive travel to active travel are unlikely ever to succeed - they are likely to involve “planing against the grain” of human nature, so they won’t work.

Some of the upshot, in terms of actions needed are the same whichever viewpoint you take, because they involve trying to change motivations by changing minds, by changing the popular narratives. I think the difference in actions might boil down to whether or not it is necessary to restrict choices, by removing the option to use a car.

My instinct is that that would be necessary in order to achieve a really substantial shift. It might be enough to re-educate everyone that cars can be bad for us all, and active travel good, but look at the case of cutting smoking: re-education and restricting competing messaging has achieved a lot, but plenty of ‘option removal’ has been necessary too.

Whether people at large would accept ‘option removal’ around car use is another question. In most places in the UK, at the moment, clearly not, and you can easily see why, but you can also see the germs of it in acceptance, welcoming even, of things like pedestrianised town centres and heavily traffic-calmed streets.

[Cugel]

From what I can see of our debate, the only difference between our views is that I believe that for good evolutionary reasons people tend to default to economising effort when not motivated to do otherwise, and you ….. well, I’m not totally sure ….. do you believe that people don’t default to economising on effort in the absence of motivation to do otherwise? Do you believe that the default state of people is to be highly physically active in the absence of motivation to be so, and that ideas in general circulation suppress that behaviour?

My take is that this is important in this context, because if you ignore, or deny the existence of, the predisposition to economise effort, then attempts to move people in large numbers from inactive travel to active travel are unlikely ever to succeed - they are likely to involve “planing against the grain” of human nature, so they won’t work.

I don't "have beliefs" in the way you seem to be describing - some sort of important-to-me principles or catechism. I see "beliefs" as essentially installed notions, ideas and memeplexes that can (and should be) uninstalled if they prove impractical, damaging or just plain daft with respect to me personally or to those we I interact with; or simply unreasonable (i.e. without any cogent justification for holding them).

The notion that "people default to economising effort when not motivated to do so" is a tautology. You might as well say that, "When people lack a motivation to act, they don't act". It tells you precisely nothing. The question is, what human motivations tend to cause which actions, a question to which there are no simple answers.

Therefore, I don't see (believe) that humans have a predisposition to be lazy, even if you give such a wide definition of "lazy" that's irrefutable, because its a tautology without any real meaning or import. That's like saying that a machine has no predisposition to work if it isn't started. Once it does work, there are many factors that come into play to describe how it works, how it responds to various inputs or other environmental conditions in which it works and how it works in conjunction with other machines to which its connected.

But there's an easy way to refute this idea that people default to being lazy - just look at any random collection or people and how they behave.

**********
The idea that we can somehow get people on bikes just by stopping their laziness - or by catering to it wholesale - tells us nothing about how to get people on bikes. If you give them all a dose of amphetamine, they'll stop lazing about but won't automatically jump on a bike. If you make bikes as comfortable and effortless as cars, they'll likely still stay with their car purely out of habit and because they've invested all sorts of notions in the act of just owning a car besides it being an A-to-Ber.

************
If we as a society want to encourage cycling whilst also discouraging motoring, for the various many and various reasons, we'd need to find all the related motivations and somehow tweak them. Accusing people of just being lazy and trying to persuade them not to be is rather like trying to tell someone who became obese to just eat less. It ignores all of the complex underlying circumstances that have given rise to the behaviours that are either lacking or too prevalent. It ignores all of the complexity of changing or initialising human motivations to do (or not do) this or that.

[Nearholmer]

Where to begin?

Setting aside the very substantial parts that you devote to attacking propositions that I haven’t made, ones that you’ve imagined I’ve made.

And, setting aside the bits where you seem to decide that the use of the word ‘believe’ necessarily and only applies to something quasi-religious and not something based on logic or observation, when common usage allows for belief based on faith, logic, observation, or a host of other things.

And, setting aside that you constantly conflate “economy of effort”, which is a deliberately value-free form of words, with the value-laden word “lazy”, and re-formulate what I’m saying into value-laden terms.

And, setting aside your implication that I’m fixated on economy of effort, to the exclusion of everything else, when all I’ve done is point to out that it’s an important factor to consider, a significant driver of the CBA attitude that several in this thread bemoan, and that efforts to change things are very unlikely to succeed if they ignore it.

….. there really doesn’t seem to be a place to begin from.

Do you completely reject the proposition that, like every other animal on the planet human beings have an evolutionarily derived predisposition to economise effort when attempting to achieve objectives, that economy of effort is our default mode?

[Geoffroid]

I reckon this discussion would benefit from a NY Times article about a research paper entitled: "The Moralization of Effort.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/opin ... ality.html

From the article: "Human beings evolved in societies that valued cooperation, the theory goes. People who work hard tend to be team players. So working hard in primitive societies was a costly but effective way of signaling one’s trustworthiness. As a result, our brains today are wired to perceive effort as evidence of morality. “Just as people will engage in unnecessary prosocial behavior to differentiate themselves as a superior cooperative partner,” the paper says, “displays of effort, including economically unnecessary effort, may serve a similar function.”"

[Nearholmer]

^^^

Sounds interesting, but I’m afraid most of it is pay-walled.

Of course, it might be possible to make status-enhancing display of working hard, by working hard, but simultaneously to economise on effort within the work - not by slacking, which would be self-defeating, but by finding efficient ways to do it. That way, not only might people value you for your contribution in terms of results, but for your ingenuity too.

[drossall]

This had the potential to be an interesting discussion of whether safety per se was enough to get people riding. It seems to have degenerated somewhat into a private flame war?

I wonder whether it's actual safety that matters, or seeing what everyone else does. We tend to assess unfamiliar things as less safe, and familiar ones as more safe, than they are. So seeing others doing things makes them seem safe, perhaps. I commute from station to office in London (on a Brompton). On Wednesday, on my back-road route, I saw two different parents each carrying two kids on those transporter bikes. Utility cycling is becoming normalised in London, so is it because it's safer, or is it seen as safer because it's happening?

[PT1029]

It comes to motivation and effort.
Motivation - it isn't only about making it easy/attractive (make the roads "safer" etc), to get the motivation you have to make the alternative less appealing.
LTNs being introduced, and add on facebook, "has anyone got a cheap bike so I can get to the Cowley Rd when I can't drive there anymore (or pedantically, when I can't drive directly and have to use a roundabout route to the Cowley Rd). It was a local Facebook group about 1 ml from the Cowley Rd.
Stevenage has a segregated cycle network, Stevenage also has a parallel road network for driving, so most people drive.
Where cycling levels have improved, it is as much due to making the alternatives less attracting/more inconvenient.
In the 1990's I worked in our local bike shop. Quite afew people gave up cycle commuting through the winter as a matter of habit, dark, cold etc. In the winter the workshop would be very quiet. One year the fuel prices went up. Come the next October, fort he first time ever, we had a lot of customers wanting to buy expensive (ie bright) lights, so they would not get dazzled on the cycle track (A40, Witney - Oxford) against the traffic in the dark. Since then, the winter cycle commuting levels have kept all the various bike shop workshops busy through the winter.

Effort - I guess we all have our perceptions. Quite a lot of my neighbours drive to the local Coop (1/2 mile, no busy main road, no traffic issues). I walk, because for 1/2 mile it isn't worth the fag of getting the bike out and locking it at the other end, even though the bike would be a little quicker overall.
From up thread " the biggest barrier to cycling is going out into the back garden unlocking the shed and rear access, going back into the garden/house to lock everything back up and then doing it all again on return" depends on the individual. After my dad died, I was stuck with his car for 6 months, and used it a small amount. However, I regarded opening the gate, getting the car out, closing the gate, parking at the journeys end (and navigating around all those roads I was unable to use in the car that I could on my bike), being stuck in traffic queues, opening the gate on return and reversing the car back in was more of a fag than gettng the bike out of the shed.
Of course, for some people who have never cycled (or not for many years), cycling is, of course hard work.....

[SCoates]

This is one of those subjects that opens up a can of worms - with so much to say. I will save people's sanity by trying to keep my own response brief!
The fact that so few people ride bikes here in the UK is not suprising to me at all (and no doubt a lot on here). We have the well-known reasons why:
- perceived danger with sharing the roads with cars - which for me is not really anywhere near as bad as is made out to be.
-England is hilly - which yes is true to a degree but I would wager that most people, if they chose to commute, would very rarely hit a big hill.
-It rains all the time - which of course it doesn't. When I commuted everyday, which worked out at around 220 days per year, I could count on one hand the number of days when I got truly soaked to the skin; and that is here in north east England, where the weather is generally much worse than most other areas in the country.
-The general negativity of cycling as a 'thing'. Yes you still get the brainless responses of road tax/red light running etc., which all adds up to a cyclist being thought of as a public nuisance.

I think the key issue is lack of proper infrastructure. I started cycling in the mid-90s, my main interest was racing, so I just 'got on with it' and riding on roads with cars wasn't something that bothered me too much. I stopped racing in 2016, and this lack of cycling paths now is a major problem for me, as I ride to actually just get to where I need to be, and when I do commute into town, it is a major ballache. I absolutely detest it, but manage to cope as I see the funny side; it is so bad it is actually quite comical, if you know what I mean. We even have a name for one of the traffic jams here the 'Marton Crawl'! If I didn't have this attitude, I would have stopped doing this years ago; so just think about this, I am a genuine comitted cyclist, yet derive no real pleasure when I ride a bike to get anywhere for business/work etc. If that is my situation, then we have a huge uphill task to get 'normal' people to decide to move onto bikes. Of course, from a 'hobby' perspective, I do enjoy cycling as we have some really nice routes, but that is cycling for fun rather than as a transport solution.

My mother is dutch, and last year I visited the Netherlands for the first time in ten-odd years and was genuinely blown away by it and just highlighted how far behind we have fallen in the UK, which I find very sad. Cycling there in proper cycle lanes everywhere is just so pleasant and as a result you just feel 'normal' rather than a 'lycra lout'.

In terms of a potential solution, the only way to get more people on bikes is to commit to huge investment in cycling infrastructure, which just won't happen without a major shift in thinking by the main political 'movers and shakers' in the UK. Of course, this problem is not just to do with cycling; there are many, many problems with the country that would require a long-term solution, and this is something we don't do here. For our country, long term is 2-3 year plans, and not 20+ which is what we would need to transform this country into one where cycling woud become enjoyable and fun as a mode of transport.

Interestingly, here in Middlesbrough, in the past twenty years, the cycling paths have actually reduced, and I don't see any more people riding bikes for a commuting purpose than they did in the mid-90s. The leisure side has definately increased, which is great but hasn't really had much effect on the numbers of people using bikes for transport reasons. And the cycle lanes we have had installed are not fit for purpose so I won't ride on them, making them totally useless. An example of this one is the one on Linthorpe Road in the town, which is really dangerous and unrideable; I used to ride down that road if I needed to, but now it is no longer possible to do so, so I will have to take a different route. The planners obviously didn't have a clue how to make a safe a good cycle path which is sadly quite normal here.