Highlights from Andrew Gilligan's report on investing in cycling in Cambridge, Milton Keynes and oxford

The report by former London cycling commissioner Andrew Gilligan in July 2018 highlights the need for £200m worth of improved cycling infrastructure in Cambridge, Oxford and Milton Keynes.

We have presented some interesting facts taken from the report:
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• Cambridge, Milton Keynes and Oxford all need an effective, cheap and – given the special nature of the historic cities’ centres – low-impact way of increasing transport capacity and catering for growth. Cycling is all three.
• Cycling is something which already epitomises both cities; which, in Cambridge, already has a greater share of journeys than any other mode, and in Oxford not much less. Yet even in Oxford and Cambridge, policymakers treat bikes as essentially marginal – so imagine what cycling could do with the attention it deserves.
• Cycling is a serious mode in both places. It has a 43% share of work journeys entirely within Cambridge (car is 25%) and a 29% share of all work journeys by Cambridge residents. Cycling has a 25% share of home to work journeys entirely within Oxford (car is 27%) and a 17% share of all commuting by Oxford residents. 
• In fact about 75 per cent of work journeys within Oxford and Cambridge are not made by car. The number of people cycling to work in Oxford is six times the UK average.
• The Government is spending about ten times more on one road project in Cambridgeshire, the dualling of a few miles of the A428, than it spends in its dedicated annual budgets for cycling across the whole of England.
• The Government should fund cycling in these places in a way which reflects how people actually do and could travel. In particular, recognise Oxford and Cambridge as the special cases which they are now, and as the trailblazers for others which they could become.
• It is recommended that £150m of the proposed £200m should be spent in and around Oxford.
• London’s new superhighway schemes included segregated tracks, completely protected from traffic, on Blackfriars Bridge and the Victoria Embankment. By November 2016, six months after they opened, the number of cyclists using these roads had risen by 55 and 54 per cent, respectively, over pre-construction levels. During the rush hour the Blackfriars Bridge track, which takes up about 20 per cent of the roadspace, carries 70 per cent of all traffic on the bridge.
• Opposition to reallocating roadspace from motoring to cycling is often based on the belief that motor traffic is like water. If you narrow the pipe, runs this argument, it will flood. If you make one route harder to drive down, the same volume of traffic will simply flow to the next easiest route. But in London, this did not happen in practice. Traffic is not a force of nature. It is the product of human choices. If we want more people to choose cycling, we need to make it more attractive.
• In Oxford, traffic on the Botley Road, the main entry from the west, went up by 10 per cent in 2016 alone and at The Plain roundabout, the main entry from the east, by 5.9 per cent. Disappointingly, as motor vehicle numbers have risen, these approaches have also seen noticeable falls in cycling