The cycling campaign vision: two-way cycling in one-way streets

Define a vision for cycling in your city. It operates as a strict filter for action. You cannot fight every bad junction or blocked cycle lane at the same time. A structured approach forces you to select one solvable problem and pursue it until the street is actually modified. A grand ambition to make a city bike friendly means absolutely nothing to a highways engineer. They need a specific location, a defined problem, and a legal mechanism to fix it. You stop asking for general improvements and start asking for specific traffic orders. The federation provided a template for doing exactly this, filtering the noise down to battles that could actually be won in a council committee room.

When the federation visited local volunteers, a distinct set of cycle campaign priorities emerged. The list included road narrowings, local 20 mph limits, road maintenance, community events and two-way cycle access in all streets. Potholes were an entirely predictable theme. Nobody likes riding through a crater in the dark on a Tuesday evening commute. For maintenance, the advice was strictly practical. You report defects through Fill That Hole or FixMyStreet. Getting a council to fill a hole requires a precise location and a photograph. These reporting tools skip the political argument and send the report to the council responsible. The street environment itself remained the core problem. The network was full of severed links and engineered conflict. The priority list had to be cut down severely. You cannot run a focused local effort if you are fighting five different types of infrastructure at the same time.

Road narrowings are a persistent, structural threat to a rider. A local authority installs a pedestrian refuge in the middle of the carriageway, leaving too little width for a driver to pass a cyclist safely. The national standard for cycle training advises riders to adopt the primary position in these situations. Highway Code Rule 72 tells riders to take the centre of the lane at the approach to road narrowings where it would be unsafe for drivers to overtake. Not every rider feels able to command the lane. A nervous commuter will hug the kerb, the driver squeezes past, and the rider is forced into the gutter. Despite this constant danger, the federation judged narrowings entirely unsuitable for a national campaign. You cannot simply ask a council to rip out a crossing island. Removing the refuge outright leaves pedestrians stranded in the middle of a busy crossing. A cycling group fighting against pedestrian safety infrastructure looks entirely anti-pedestrian to the general public. You cannot win an argument that pits two vulnerable groups against each other in a public meeting.

Speed dictates the appeal of a street. A rider will not use a route if the vehicles passing them are moving far too fast. Local groups naturally wanted lower speed limits, as a 20 mph zone reduces noise and makes the road surface feel significantly less hostile. The federation chose not to lead this charge. The territory was already occupied by people doing a much better job. 20's Plenty for Us, a not-for-profit community interest company, was already supporting local 20 mph campaigns. The instruction to local groups was simple. You find the local 20's Plenty campaign and you join them. Leaving the speed limit fight to the specialists was a matter of basic campaign efficiency.

The chosen national theme was two-way cycling in one-way streets. A one-way system is a map of severed connections. It forces a rider onto busy arterial roads for a trip that should take three minutes.The way opened in October 2011 when the Department for Transport published a policy paper titled Signing the Way. It allowed English councils to use the combined no entry except cycles sign wherever they deemed it suitable. Pilots in London had shown no noticeable increase in casualties. The task was simply forcing councils to implement the signs on the ground. The change often needs little more than signs, lines and a traffic order. It gave local volunteers a specific, measurable demand to put in front of their local transport committees.

You do not ask a council to fix the whole city at once. You pick one street and force the change through the committee system.

The federation listed the objections to expect: the traffic is too heavy, too fast, the street too narrow, parked cars are in the way, drivers do not expect bikes, and side roads add conflict. The London pilots are the first answer to the safety objection.

State the case, wait for the traffic order, then pick the next street on the map. The campaign guides cover traffic order objections step by step, and the Space for Cycling campaign that followed in 2014 widened the asks to six themes.