BIKE NATION

Copyright © Peter Walker 2017

Cover detail © Getty images

Peter Walker has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Yellow Jersey in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781911214946

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A huge number of people helped with this book, not least those who talked me through their many areas of expertise – I’m very grateful to all of them. Particular thanks should go to those who also showed me around their cities, pointing out the things that work for bikes, and the things that don’t.

Extra thanks to Doug Gordon, of the Brooklyn Spoke blog, who assisted me hugely with people to talk to in the United States (and took me on a marathon tour of New York City’s bike lanes). Also to Mark Wagenbuur, who runs the Bicycle Dutch blog, and kindly translated the ‘Stop de Kindermoord’ article in chapter 2.

Gratitude also to colleagues at the Guardian, my day job, who have spent several years patiently listening to my regular talk about cycling.

Finally, huge thanks to Alison Tulett, the copy editor, Alice Brett, who proofread the book, to my wonderful editor, Tim Broughton, and my fantastic agent, Rachel Mills.

INTRODUCTION

NOT EVERYONE ON A BIKE IS A CYCLIST

It was about 10.30 on a sunny Sunday morning, a couple of days before I sat down to write this, when the flotilla of cyclists came into view from around a corner. There must have been about thirty of them, riding more or less every sort of bike you could imagine. At the front, pedalling an ancient folding machine at a sedate, regal cadence, was a woman probably in her sixties, wearing red trousers and a bright blue visor to shield her eyes from the glare. As I watched from the pavement she gave me a grin in passing.

Behind her were men and women of various ages, a few dressed up in the default city cycling garb of luminous jacket and shiny helmet, but most in ordinary clothes, on very everyday bikes. I had no idea if they were some sort of unfathomable organised group, or whether the arbitrary actions of traffic lights and chance had somehow coalesced them into this wonderful, accidental peloton.

But then the thought struck me: either way, these people wouldn’t have been here just a few months ago.

‘Here’ was a road in central London called Lower Thames Street, which, as its name suggests, adjoins the river that flows through the city. An ancient thoroughfare – it was mentioned in the city’s eleventh-century customs records – the road was widened and rebuilt in the 1960s: turned into the sort of double-lane urban motorway so popular in that era, when the dominance of the car appeared absolute and for ever.

After this happened, very few cyclists would ride on Lower Thames Street, which becomes the equally inhospitable Upper Thames Street as it heads west. It tended to be only the gung-ho and bold who did so, almost all young men, often professional cycle couriers in a hurry, those who didn’t mind holding a lane amid a stream of taxis and trucks, speeding under the bridges and along the concrete canyons. I have always been a reasonably confident rider, but I would avoid Lower Thames Street if I could. It just wasn’t fun. The idea of a woman in her sixties choosing to cycle along it, even on a Sunday morning, would have been absurd. Such riders were excluded from large sections of their city.

So what changed? It was nothing more than a bike lane. In 2014, Lower and Upper Thames Street were selected to form part of the route for one of London’s first two modern Dutch-style routes – boldly called Cycle Superhighways – which would shield riders from the motor traffic with continuous kerbs, protected junctions, and bike-only traffic light sequences.

This was a controversial process. Businesses along the way objected, saying the lanes would bring London to a halt. The trade group representing the city’s iconic black cabs openly laughed at the idea that there were enough riders to fill such broad bike thoroughfares. Outside of rush hour they would be unused, it predicted – a failure, a tumbleweed-strewn embarrassment.

In May 2015 the lanes opened: a long east-to-west route taking in Lower Thames Street and a shorter route going from south to north. And then the cyclists arrived. In a mass.

What was at the time my regular route to work saw me head along the north–south Superhighway. I had begun cycling in London some years before, when to do so made you something of a freak, an exception. In those days, other riders were sufficiently rare that you’d sometimes nod to each other in acknowledgement as you passed. Suddenly, on the new, separated lane, I found myself waiting at traffic lights amid a pack of two dozen or more cyclists, with a similar-sized horde paused at the other side of the junction.

For me, more interesting even than the numbers was the identity of these new riders. London’s bike culture has long been dominated by speedy young men riding rapid bikes in specialised clothing, a product of the feral traffic culture and lack of dedicated provision for cyclists. But now other people were emerging on bikes: older, younger, slower, dressed in ordinary clothes, not riding lightweight racing bikes with ultra-skinny tyres.

This book is ultimately about such everyday riders, and the astonishing and varied ways in which they can transform the urban environment and way of life for the better. It’s about people like the sixty-something woman with the visor and her motley gang of followers.

In fact, you could even say this book isn’t about cyclists at all. In one sense it is, of course. It describes the many wonderful and unexpected ways that lives and societies can improve if only more people decide they are happy to ride a bike. And if you ride a bike, you’re cycling, and thus a cyclist. Correct?

Well, yes and no. In many places, particularly the UK, America, Australia, or anywhere else where the private car still dominates, if you tell someone ‘I’m a cyclist,’ they’re likely to make a few instant assumptions. You’re an enthusiast. An advocate, even. You ride everywhere, and make a vocal point of doing so. You might have opinions about gear ratios and a drawer full of garish, figure-hugging bike clothes.

I partly fall into that category. I have cycled regularly, and occasionally over long distances, for a couple of decades. While I’m a news journalist I’ve also written quite a bit about cycling issues for my paper, the Guardian. I receive occasional bike-themed Christmas presents.

But I think the world needs fewer people like me, or perhaps more accurately it needs more bike riders like the crowd on Lower Thames Street, who don’t treat cycling quite so seriously. If cycling is indeed going to save the world, it won’t be the Lycra-clad road warriors who’ll be doing it. The big changes – and they can be huge – happen when a nation doesn’t see cycling as a hobby, a sport, a mission, let alone a way of life. They happen when it becomes nothing more than a convenient, quick, cheap way of getting about, with the unintended bonus that you get some exercise in the process.

This is, sadly, not very common in the more car-centred nations. Cyclists are still generally viewed as a breed, a niche. They are also seen as a curiously homogenous mass. The moment I swing my legs over a crossbar, it appears, I’m a blob within a group. It doesn’t matter that I also use cars, trains, buses, the Underground, my own two feet, occasionally taxis or planes, very occasionally trams, and very, very rarely the slightly eccentric and little-used cable car link over the River Thames in east London. For some reason it’s only a bike that defines me.

Things are very different elsewhere. The Dutch and Danish – you’ll be hearing a fair bit more about them in this book – tend to view cycling as little more than a particularly efficient form of walking. In such countries, bike riding is so ubiquitous, so normal, that almost no one defines themselves as a cyclist, any more than they might, say, define themselves as a wearer of coats or a person who takes showers.

For myself, as the years go on, while I still occasionally gaze longingly at shiny, expensive bikes in magazines, more of my actual cycling is along this continental European model. I now mainly ride clad in ordinary clothes on a solid, upright bike with a basket at the front and a child seat (and sometimes a child) at the back. I make short trips to the shops, or work, or to a school. Gradually and gratifyingly, it seems, I’m becoming part of the solution.

This is important because the overwhelming evidence is that mass cycling – the sort where, say, 20 per cent or even 30 per cent of all trips in a country are made by bike – only happens when cycling becomes mainstream and everyday. That might seem self-evident, a circular argument even, but it can’t be stressed too much. It means you will never get very many people cycling when the bulk of riders are kitted out with helmets, Day-Glo jackets, helmet-mounted video cameras and all the other high-tech accoutrements seen in less-bike-friendly nations. Cycling, dressed up as a hobby, let alone an extreme sport, will never encourage more than a few per cent of people to take part.

I delve into the mysterious and counter-intuitive world of helmets and high-visibility gear later in the book. But it’s worth immediately noting this: while they’re not inherently bad, they’re less a safety device for cycling than a symptom of a road network where no cyclist can truly feel safe.

So what is the answer? That leads us to the other big point. As Lower Thames Street (and countless other places) shows, mass cycling needs decent infrastructure and planning. Countries with lots of bikes have a few things in common: firstly, segregated lanes that shield riders from motor traffic with a physical barrier on busy roads; and secondly, slower vehicle speeds on smaller routes. And once this is done comprehensively the bike helmets and fluorescent waistcoats suddenly disappear. They’re not needed any more.

Such systems need to be not just well designed and maintained but also cohesive, connected and able to protect riders at perilous points like junctions. They must be secure and navigable for cyclists of all speeds and levels of confidence, including children and older people. They need planning, investment and above all the political will to take space from motor vehicles – elements that can be all too rare.

One question remains, and it is a question that frames this book: why? Why should car drivers, still the majority transport users in virtually all industrialised countries, make way for these anachronistic, bumbling, bell-tinkling, grease-trousered, wicker-basketed, two-wheeled interlopers?

I seek to explain all this in the coming chapters, but for now let’s quickly imagine what would happen if I could press a magic button and transform the UK’s derisory 2 per cent or so statistic for the share of all journeys that are made using a bike¹ to a near-Dutch level of around 25 per cent.² In an instant it would mean that many millions of people in a chronically sedentary nation would make a large number of physically active journeys a year. I detail the ongoing public health disaster caused by inactivity in the next chapter, but my own cautious (if slightly back-of-the-envelope) calculations estimate that a jump to a 25 per cent cycling share would easily save about 15,000 lives every year in the UK alone.

And that’s just one country. Multiply that around the globe and a significant shift away from cars to bikes for even short, urban trips could save millions of lives annually. This might sound hyperbolic, beyond what’s possible from people simply changing how they travel around. This is largely because not many people appreciate the sheer scale of the worldwide pandemic of disease caused by sedentary living, or the fact that it threatens to bankrupt our own NHS before long.

This alone would seem reason enough to summon the bulldozers and start building bike lanes immediately. But then you have less smog and the accompanying benefits in combating climate change. A reduction in car use means fewer families destroyed by the grief of road deaths, especially among the more vulnerable, such as children and the elderly. You can even factor in a notable boost to overall mental health, and more vibrant local economies.

But most of all, after that magic button was pressed, you’d suddenly find yourself among towns and cities that were more welcoming to human beings, instead of being built for rapid, anonymous, one-tonne metal boxes, often carrying a single person for a laughably short distance. This is absolutely not to say cars will have no place in a cycle-centric imagined future, because of course they still will, even if they might end up being driverless ones. For now, however, they’re used far too often – and frequently for the wrong sort of trips.

In a world dominated instead by bikes, people can amble, children can play, fresh air can be breathed, conversations can be heard, all without our omniscient, noisy, smelly, lethal modern-day plague. If the sixty-something woman in the visor had been driving along Lower Thames Street, the chances are we could never have exchanged a smile. She would have been another impersonal head and shoulders glimpsed briefly through a windscreen. Cyclists are recognisably human, travelling at human-scaled speeds. As a benefit to urban living, that can hardly be overstated.

So yes, cycling can save the world – or at the very least make it a significantly and noticeably more healthy, safe, equitable and happy place.

There are two more key points to stress. The first is that building a safe, inclusive and welcoming environment for bikes doesn’t just help the people who ride them. Even if you decide to shun every cycle lane built, you still benefit from the cleaner air, safer, quieter streets and more people-oriented urban environment. Few people enjoy sitting on a café terrace next to speeding lanes of motor traffic. If it’s bikes rolling past you barely notice them. I have yet to meet anyone who has come back from Copenhagen or Amsterdam and remarked, ‘Nice place, I just wish there had been a few more cars about.’

The second benefit is one that affects everyone: more cycle lanes generally means few traffic jams, even for those in cars, lorries or buses.

This can seem counter-intuitive, especially when a key element of encouraging cycling is to take space away from motor vehicles on main roads, and make driving less convenient on other routes. It can cause controversy, and across the UK and elsewhere plans for proper bike routes are often met by predictions of chaos. While the traffic can snarl up as bike lanes are built, and even for a period afterwards while drivers get used to new road layouts, the lesson from around the world is that bikes ultimately unclog the streets.

This is because bicycles are so amazingly space efficient. The standard calculation is that one lane of a typical UK road can carry about 2,000 vehicles per hour. With bikes, the figure shoots up to 14,000 per hour. Even factoring in things like bus use, that’s a lot more people moving about in the same area of road, with the added bonus of a reduced need for parking spaces. In the end, more bikes means more space on the roads for the motor vehicles that really need to be there, not to mention some extra seats on public transport.

This can’t be stressed enough. In congested and historic towns and cities amid an era where demolishing entire blocks to widen the streets is no longer politically acceptable, road space is necessarily finite, even as more and more people seek to travel along it. This prompts the question that must be put, repeatedly, to all those who oppose cycling infrastructure: if not bikes then what? How will you end the gridlock?

Another important thing to stress is that you don’t have to be an environmental zealot to think more cycling is a good idea. Yes, I like the fact that riding a bike helps reduce my greenhouse emissions. But it’s probably not even in the top five reasons I do it.

I cycle because it’s convenient, cheap, fun and gets me where I need to go on time. I cycle because it’s hugely enjoyable, to the extent I’m one of the few people who generally looks forward to their commute. Riding around the city means I don’t have to worry about finding the time to go to a gym.

I’m not some Luddite crank who believes people should turn their backs on the modern world and embrace an antiquated technology. That’s yet another paradox of the bicycle, and perhaps the most important one of all. For all that its basic design hasn’t fundamentally changed since its arrival in the late nineteenth century, the bike is almost uniquely suited to life in an increasingly urbanised modern world.

More than half the globe’s population now lives in towns or cities,³ many of which are clogged and choked by motor traffic. The bicycle can play a huge role in changing this, and is already beginning to do so in many places. Amid the sometimes-gloomy talk in upcoming chapters of public health disasters, smog-wreathed cities and traffic casualties, real change is coming.

This is, above all, a story of hope.

CHAPTER 1

THE MIRACLE PILL: BIKES MAKE EVERYONE MORE HEALTHY

I NO LONGER TRUSTED MY BODY

This book isn’t a memoir. But it would never have been written without my own very personal experience of cycling, particularly the effect it had on my health. There’s even a plausible argument that riding a bike saved my life. So before I describe how bikes could transform global physical well-being, allow me a brief personal detour.

It’s not wholly unfair to say I was something of a runt as a child, scrawny to a degree that these days would possibly bring a home visit from a social worker. I was also affected by severe asthma, which emerged very early at age two, in the wake of a near-fatal bout of pneumonia.

As a child this never stopped me from playing sport. I was an enthusiastic if very obviously untalented footballer, but my efforts were generally soundtracked by a slight wheeze and the voices of concerned adults asking if I should perhaps have a sit-down.

All this was nonetheless manageable until my late teens, when I experienced a spate of sudden and very acute bouts of breathlessness, not uncommon in asthmatics at that age. For me, these culminated in half a dozen or more trips to the emergency unit of my local hospital in Macclesfield, in suburban Cheshire. There I was swiftly injected with Aminofilin, a powerful and near-miraculous drug I only later learned can have occasional serious side effects, including heart complications. Suddenly able to breathe again, I would spend several days begging doctors to be allowed to go home from a chest ward packed with coughing pensioners smelling strongly of tobacco.

More than once my breathlessness was sufficiently worrying for a doctor to sprint to the medicine cupboard. This is not a reassuring sight. Well over 1,000 people die from asthma every year in Britain.¹ It’s far from inconceivable that I could have been among them.

As often happens with the condition, things improved over time. My three years at university saw just one hospital stay. But by then I had lost confidence in my physical ability. I stopped playing sport, rarely even broke into a run, and kept my spindly, ghostly pale legs wrapped in long trousers. I no longer trusted my body.

Fast-forward a year or so to a large, shabby rented house in north London. The twenty-two-year-old me has pushed a chair into the middle of a bedroom and, clad in a T-shirt and a pair of extremely tight leggings, I am standing on it to examine myself in a large wall-mounted mirror.

Before this vignette gets too alarming, let me explain. Three months earlier I’d suddenly given up a dull if secure graduate career to become a bicycle courier, or messenger. This was something of a surprise to friends and family, especially those who knew I’d not ridden a bike, or done anything noticeably physical, for quite a few years.

It’s hard to explain my motivation. I’m not sure even I knew at the time. An element was possibly to present myself with an inescapable daily physical challenge. ‘You feel let down by your body?’ went the half-heard internal voice. ‘Now you’re relying on it to pay the rent.’

These days courier fashion is a staple in style magazines – the tattoos, the single rolled-up trouser cuff, the fixed-gear bike. But this was an era when the trade was generally populated by misfits, by greasy-fingered, unsocialised types who got anxious if they had to stay indoors for more than ten minutes.

Even amid this world of slight oddballs, I stood out, mainly because, knowing next to nothing about cycling, I had kitted myself out with an absurdly impractical and clunky mountain bike, weighing about as much as a small moped. I rode this around London dressed in a combination of my own clothes and those borrowed from my then-girlfriend, wrapped in ever-thicker layers, as I’d compounded my rashness by beginning this new outdoor career in autumn.

The mechanics of the courier trade are fascinating. It is simultaneously a deeply exploitative industry and one where, at least in that largely pre-email era, the paid-by-the-delivery earnings could be very high. Before long these were sufficient to pay off my student debts, a process helped by my being too exhausted to spend money on much else beyond the industrial-sized sacks of pasta on which I subsisted. More relevant is that after a few months pedalling my behemoth of a bike for about 60 miles a day, the effect was starting to show, even on a Milquetoast like me.

This brings us back to the north London bedroom. A couple of days beforehand I had begun insulating my legs from the winter chill with a pair of my girlfriend’s thick cotton leggings, over which I wore a pair of denim shorts (I did say the courier trade wasn’t fashionable then). That evening, getting undressed ahead of the obligatory post-work bath, where I would happily steam amid a rising black tidemark of pollution residue, I decided to inspect my new look.

Then came the shock. Not from the leggings. The mirror showed those to be about as curious-looking as I’d expected. What struck me was the encased silhouette of my legs. They had been traditionally unimpressive. A cruel teenage acquaintance once likened them to lengths of string with knots for the knees. But now they had shape. Form. Muscles. Definite muscles. I was amazed. I spent a good ten minutes on that chair, staring.

In retrospect it might sound obvious that being in your early twenties and exercising vigorously for ten hours a day makes you look and feel much better, but it was a transformative moment for my life. In the months to come I’d occasionally bump into university contemporaries as I delivered packages and, once they’d stifled their surprise that someone with a good degree from a decent university was doing such a job, many would remark on how, you know, healthy I looked.

I remained a bike courier for three years, far longer than strictly necessary. This included a stint in Sydney, Australia, working for a company called Top Gun, who, perhaps believing the name alone wasn’t sufficiently camp, kitted out their riders in skintight, hot-pink Lycra jerseys. If you didn’t start off with some measure of body confidence, you soon picked it up. A couple of times I was on the receiving end of wolf whistles, and I still like to think they weren’t ironic.

Amid this period I forgot my lifelong sense of doomed physical fragility. It was always assumed that I was the fittest person in my peer group. Friends in the pub would, after a few drinks, quietly ask to squeeze my thigh muscles. I would race buses from the traffic lights on my bike for fun. I was suddenly invincible.

Let me add some important context here: you don’t need to ride 300 miles a week every week, or even be in your early twenties, to feel the benefits of cycling. As we’ll see, just a relatively sedate daily bike commute can have a near-miraculous health impact, and at more or less any age. As mentioned in the introduction, my own cycling is now closer to this more tranquil model. I have become very much more the everyday rider. It’s been some time since anyone squeezed my thigh in a pub.

Given this, I decided to see whether my more ordinary cycling regime was still keeping me healthy. The best way to find out was to take a VO₂ max test, which measures peak oxygen uptake. Expressed in millilitres of oxygen absorbed per kilo of body weight per minute, it’s generally viewed as being as good a way as any to objectively measure someone’s aerobic fitness, and thus their associated cardiovascular health.

And so I ended up in the sports science laboratory of the University of Kent, a large, windowless room filled with stationary exercise bikes, between which flitted white-coated technicians carrying trays of test tubes. I was there to take what’s known as a ramp test, one of the more obviously sadistic procedures scientists are permitted to inflict. This saw me placed on one of the bikes and ordered to turn the pedals at a certain, constant speed while the resistance was incrementally raised, as if climbing an increasingly steep incline. The torment lasted for about twenty minutes until my lungs eventually gave out, and I reached a sweaty, juddering, breathless halt. If that wasn’t enough, this was all done while wearing a clammy, full-face rubber mask, while every five minutes someone pricked my finger to extract blood and test it for levels of exertion-induced lactates.

My personal torturer/tester was James Hopker, an affable senior academic at the university, who works closely with British Cycling. The results would take a week to be processed, he told me, gently peeling the mask from my slumped form. What would happen, I thought gloomily, if the conclusion came back that I have distinctly average fitness for a man of my age? Possibly I’d give up the idea for this book.

IT’S NOT CYCLING THAT’S DANGEROUS

Many cyclists will have experienced this conversation at some point. While waiting at a red traffic light, a driver, generally a man, starts chatting through the open car window. ‘You’re brave,’ they will say in a convivial tone. ‘Wouldn’t catch me cycling. Much too dangerous.’

When this happens to me I usually have time for no more than a weak smile before the lights change. But in a parallel world I would discover the driver’s home address and burst through their front door that evening. ‘Dangerous?’ I would bellow, as they stumbled up from the sofa, lit by the flickering blue glow of a flat-screen television. ‘You think riding a bike is dangerous? It’s this TV that’s going to kill you.’ This would, of course, be vastly pompous, and risk a well-deserved punch to the nose. But I’d be right. It might sound counter-intuitive, but watching television can be far more deadly than riding around the truck-clogged streets of a major city.

Don’t just take my word for it. Listen to Dr Adrian Davis, who has thirty years’ experience advising everyone from the British government to the NHS and the World Health Organization on the links between public health and transport. ‘When people say cycling is dangerous, they’re wrong,’ he says. ‘Sitting down – which is what most of the population does far too much of – that’s the thing that’s going to kill you.’²

How can that be so? In part it’s because cycling in Britain and similarly car-dominated countries, while considerably more dangerous than it should be, is nonetheless safer than many people believe. In contrast, remarkably few people fully comprehend the extent of the health risks brought by an inactive lifestyle.

Every year, somewhere just above one hundred British people die on bikes, a figure that could and should be significantly lower.³ But over those same twelve months, public health experts say, about 85,000 other Britons die from conditions linked to a lack of physical activity, notably cardiovascular problems and cancer.⁴ Even this is likely to be a conservative estimate. Depending on who you listen to, sedentary living is either the second or the fourth most common risk factor associated with early death. Not far behind it is obesity, which is itself exacerbated by inactivity.

Seeking to contrast these perils, researchers from Utrecht University’s self-explanatorily named Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences studied dozens of existing papers in 2010 to calculate what would happen if a hypothetical group of 500,000 people switched overnight from travelling by car to cycling: would the health gains from more exercise outweigh the risks from pollution and road crashes?

For the safe and bike-friendly Netherlands the results were, as you’d expect, conclusive: on average the benefits exceeded the perils by a factor of about nine, a figure that increased as people got older. But the effect was dramatically positive more or less anywhere you looked. Even in Britain the life-extending advantages were greater by a factor of seven.⁵

When you extrapolate this effect from 500,000 people to a whole nation, the overall dangers from cycling, even amid the somewhat feral traffic environment of a London, a Birmingham or a Glasgow, become a mere speck on public health risk charts.

In contrast, the more you look at the evidence, the more risks there are from a sofa-bound life in front of the TV. A major study by researchers at the US’s National Cancer Institute followed more than half a million Americans aged fifty to seventy over an eight-year period. The key conclusion? Watching a lot of TV made people significantly more likely to die, even when you accounted for factors like smoking, age, gender, race and education. In fact, those who watched the most – an admittedly Herculean average of seven hours or more per day – were 60 per cent more likely to die during the course of the project than those who limited it to an hour or less.⁶

Those who chronicle such perils say that even relatively small amounts of fairly moderate exercise can slash the risks. Cycling, in particular, has been found to have an almost miraculous effect, in part because it is so easy to incorporate into everyday life, but also as it has a tendency to tempt people into slightly more strenuous effort, magnifying the advantage.

Study after study has shown that people who cycle regularly are less prone to obesity, diabetes, strokes, heart disease and various cancers. Cyclists don’t just get extra life years, they’re more likely to remain mobile and independent into older age. Scientists are also only just beginning to understand the effects of exercise on our brains, and how it appears to ward off dementia.

The most comprehensive study of the health benefits of bike commuting, which we’ll read more about later, found people who commuted by bike had a 40 per cent lower chance of dying during the fifteen-year course of the project than those who didn’t. That’s not far short of a miracle. If these benefits could be administered in an injection, it would be considered one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time. The scientist who devised it would be a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize. Millions of lives a year would be saved. And yet it’s already here.

THE PANDEMIC OF PHYSICAL INACTIVITY

If you ask a public health expert why cycling is so good for people, they usually begin with the inescapable contradiction that even as human lifestyles have changed beyond recognition in just the past few decades, the basic physiology of our bodies remains more or less the same as it was tens of thousands of years ago. ‘We are designed as hunter-gatherers, and we’ve not outlived our biological destiny,’ says Adrian Davis. ‘We are meant to be physically active, and within modernity we’ve done everything we conceivably can, it seems, to remove physical activity from our lives, down to having electric toothbrushes.’⁷

The point is echoed by Francesca Racioppi, a senior policymaker at the World Health Organization (WHO), who has spent twenty years devising programmes to make people more active. ‘We have to bear in mind that the way people live is very different to the way it was not very long ago,’ she says. ‘Once, half of us were peasants and another 40 per cent worked in factories, and those were physically demanding jobs. Now the vast majority of people have switched to jobs where physical activity is excluded, and we have to live with the unintended side effects.’⁸

These unintended side effects are vast. In fact, it’s not any sort of exaggeration to say the world faces a health catastrophe from sedentary living.

How big a catastrophe depends on who you ask. The subject is complicated, not least because problems caused by lack of exercise inevitably become entwined with those connected to obesity. However, the WHO puts the annual global toll for inactivity alone at around 3.2 million people.⁹ That’s significantly more than the entire population of Greater Manchester, dying younger than they should, every year. About 9,000 people a day. On a very gloomy WHO league table of what kills most people around the world, inactivity is fourth, beaten only by high blood pressure, tobacco and excess blood glucose. But some experts think even this is an underestimate.

Ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, revered medical journal the Lancet ran a special issue devoted to what it termed the ‘pandemic of physical inactivity’. One of the papers, led by I-Min Lee, a Harvard professor of epidemiology – the study of population-wide health trends – went further than the WHO estimates. It calculated that inactivity causes between 6 and 10 per cent of cases of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and breast and colon cancers, killing around 5.3 million people a year, about the same number as tobacco.¹⁰

That’s not the population of Greater Manchester, that’s the population of Scotland.

To get to grips with the science behind all this, I asked Dr Justin Varney, head of adult well-being for Public Health England, what would happen if I were to hypothetically give away my bike and spend most of the next few years sitting on a sofa watching television. My mitochondria, the ‘engine houses of your individual cells’, as he calls them, would get increasingly sluggish. Before long the cells would not function so well, making me more prone to some cancers, notably bowel cancer.¹¹

Then there are the telomeres. These tiny strands of protein in our cells gradually shorten as part of the ageing process, but this process seems to be slowed by staying active (and also, Varney added, by meditation – that’s believed to be one reason why you see so many ancient Buddhist monks). Scientists still don’t quite understand how it happens, but the simple answer is that if I stopped exercising I’d age more quickly. Finally, by being active, I get my blood pumping faster, properly oxygenating my organs. Varney eloquently describes it thus: ‘If you imagine your blood like a flowing stream, the faster it moves the more it moves out all the crud in your system.’ Thus, the combined effect of my inactivity marathon would eventually place me at far greater risk of everything from high blood pressure to heart disease and cancer.

My hypothetical experiment has, in a way, been replicated on a vast level in the world’s most populous nation. During China’s recent and rapid economic development, millions of its citizens stopped cycling and walking and suddenly began to drive. As late as the mid-1980s, cars were virtually never seen outside a few cities. Now there are more than 150 million of them. And the effect is being felt. Researchers on one city, Shanghai, tracked the lives of 75,000 women from 1997 to 2004, finding that those who still cycled for transport had 35 per cent less chance of dying over the study period than even their previously healthy peers who were less active.¹²

Even limited exercise can bring significant results. Francesca Racioppi describes a recent WHO project carried out with the University of Oxford to quantify the overall health benefits of even just the minimum of physical activity. It concluded that simply reaching the very modest WHO recommended level – more on that in a second – cuts your overall chance of dying early by 10 per cent.

‘This isn’t a huge amount of exercise,’ she says. ‘It’s just moderate things like walking or cycling, meeting the basic WHO guidelines. But 10 per cent is massive, a very important effect. If this was a pill, people would say it was a miracle.’¹³

CARS MAKE YOU FATTER

This idea of activity as a wonder drug is one you hear a lot. And yet this miracle pill is, relatively speaking, quick, easy and pain-free to administer. The official WHO threshold of being physically active for adults is doing 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, or half an hour a day, five days a week. If the exertion is vigorous, just 75 minutes a week is enough. By moderate, they really do mean moderate: it includes things like brisk walking, gardening or housework. The official WHO table lists around a dozen examples, also including ‘traditional hunting and gathering’ and ‘thatching a house’.

The WHO’s more technical definition of ‘moderate’ is three to six metabolic equivalents, or METs, which means expending between three and six times as much effort as you would by just sitting down. This isn’t a huge amount. Jogging can easily reach ten or twelve METs of effort. By happy coincidence, a slow trundle on a bike tends to equate to about five or six METs. And should you happen to push yourself beyond six METs you’re suddenly within the WHO’s definition of vigorous physical activity. Meeting the guidelines through this amounts to little more than ten minutes a day.

Even if you stick with moderate activity, 150 minutes a week doesn’t sound like a huge amount, whether or not you’re a roof-thatching hunter-gatherer. And yet vast numbers of people simply don’t do it. In Britain, about a third of men and almost half of women don’t reach the WHO minimum, a figure that rises significantly as people get older. About one in five of the male population and one in four among the women are classified as completely inactive.

Worldwide, the WHO says, about a third of all adults are insufficiently physical.¹⁴ Some of the statistics are almost shocking. The National Travel Survey carried out by Britain’s Department for Transport has found that people make a third fewer trips on foot than they did in 1995. A fifth of all people say they haven’t walked more than twenty minutes even once in the past year.¹⁵

Additionally, as health statisticians wearily note, even in the era of activity trackers on phones and other fitness gadgets, most data is still self-reported, meaning the scale of the problem is almost certainly greater than billed. It is in part why some experts are setting their targets very low. Justin Varney and his team at Public Health England are currently trying to persuade people to do just thirty minutes of moderate exercise a week. That might seem remarkably little – just walking half a mile three times a week would do it – but even this modest effort can bring impressive results.

‘If we get everyone to 150 minutes, fantastic,’ Varney says. ‘However, I come from a pragmatic school of thought. If we can get the entire population doing at least thirty minutes a week, which is not scary for people, that would have a significant impact on the burden of ill health in this country.’

This is because even relatively tiny amounts of not especially strenuous exercise can have enormous benefits. One of the world’s leading experts on the subject is Professor David Buchner, who spent nine years in charge of physical activity for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and chaired the group that wrote the American government’s official guidelines on the subject.

These echo those of the WHO – at least 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, or twice that for even more benefit. But, as Buchner says, almost anything does some good. ‘The truth is that if everybody in the country added ten minutes a day, it would have a huge public health effect,’ he says. ‘It’s a very steep dose-response curve at the low range of physical activity. We don’t want the public to misunderstand that if they don’t get up to high levels they won’t get the benefit. They just need to start doing a little bit more, and they’ll start getting more benefit.’¹⁶

US inactivity statistics are even worse than those for Britain, Buchner says, with about 50 per cent of adults not meeting the guidelines. ‘It’s a major public health issue in the United States, as it is globally,’ he says.

Others set more ambitious goals. Professor Wendy Brown from the University of Queensland led the team that compiled Australia’s current physical activity targets. These advise people to aim for twice the WHO recommendation – 300 minutes of exercise a week, or an hour a day five times. Brown explains this as a response to the parallel public health scourge of obesity in Australia, a country now ranked as the fourth fattest in the developed world. ‘One of the things about us is that there’s a perception we’re a nation of active, bronzed Aussies – surfing, being on beaches, and things like that,’ Brown says. ‘In reality, we’re actually much more a nation of sports watchers.’

The 300-minute goal was an attempt to ‘push the range’, she explains: ‘We advise that if you want to avoid weight gain it has to be an hour a day. We’re the only ones in the world so far, but I reckon it won’t be long before others follow.’¹⁷

The WHO calculates that more than a third of all adults worldwide are overweight or obese. In a first for human history, significantly more people are now dying from eating too much than too little. The health consequences are almost beyond comprehension. The National Health Service spends about £16 billion a year treating conditions associated with obesity, especially type 2 diabetes – the form of the disorder often associated with excess weight and inactivity.¹⁸ In 2014 the head of England’s health service said obesity could soon bankrupt the NHS, calling it ‘a slow-motion car crash in terms of avoidable illness and rising healthcare costs’.¹⁹

Obesity is a slightly more tricky area for this book, since it’s arguably caused as much by diet, especially the modern ubiquity of cheap, high-sugar, high-starch convenience foods, as by other factors. But physical activity does play a key role in maintaining a healthy weight. And there’s another, less-known connection: overweight people who exercise tend to be far more healthy than their slim, inactive peers.

Justin Varney explains: ‘There’s more and more evidence that if you’re fat and fit you’re healthier than someone who is a healthy weight and sedentary. Your best option is to be a healthy weight and to be physically active. But if you’re an unhealthy weight, being active will significantly reduce the risk of things like diabetes and coronary heart disease, and reduces your mortality.’

There is increasing evidence that being inactive is, in fact, more deadly than being overweight. One huge recent study, led by the University of Cambridge, traced more than 300,000 European men and women over twelve years, seeing what impact both of these had on their health. It extrapolated the findings to estimate that of 9.2 million deaths in Europe in a given year, about 337,000 could be attributed to obesity. The number blamed on physical inactivity? A total of 676,000.²⁰

At the same time, cycling is a great way to ensure people don’t become overweight in the first place. One landmark study saw academics follow the health of 5,000 people in eight provinces around China from 1989 to 1997, a period when many households bought their first ever car. Even after adjusting for diet and other factors, men who acquired a motor vehicle for the first time gained on average more than a kilo of weight more than those who didn’t.²¹

It seems that cars make you fatter.

THE BENEFITS OF ACCIDENTAL EXERCISE

Now that we’ve outlined this huge, worldwide problem, the obvious question occurs: why is cycling the solution? In part it’s down to a phenomenon known as incidental activity. Guaranteed to make a public health expert prick up their ears, this is based around the idea that people are far more likely to be physical if the exercise is integrated into their everyday lives rather than being an artificial extra.

Until fairly recently, most people got their allocation of activity through work, and the benefits of this were known for decades. A famous study from 1953, also published in the Lancet, followed more than 31,000 men who worked on London’s buses, trams and trolleybuses, and compared the incidence of heart disease between those who sat down for a living – the drivers – and their more active colleagues who were conductors or guards. It found that drivers were significantly more likely to suffer cardiac problems.²²

In the Lancet’s subsequent 2012 examination of the decline in physical activity, the edition’s editors made it plain what sort of things were needed to make a difference. ‘It is not about running on a treadmill, whilst staring at a mirror and listening to your iPod,’ they wrote. ‘It is about using the body that we have in the way it was designed, which is to walk often, run sometimes, and move in ways where we physically exert ourselves regularly whether that is at work, at home, in transport to and from places, or during leisure time in our daily lives.’

²³