May 3, 2021 - 7:00am
The upcoming London mayoral election is an embarrassing joke, with a clear winner and a bunch of no-hopers who aren’t even funny or interesting, some of whom are actual public health hazards. Since there is almost nothing to say about the candidates, here are my suggestions of what we should do to make London a better city, by copying others.
Tokyo: housing
The Japanese capital is home to about a gazillion people but its huge demand for property is matched by an unmatched supply in a deregulated housing market.
Incredibly, increasing the supply of property helps keeps prices down, while London’s restrictive planning rules do the opposite. (Of course, the best way we could increase supply while also making our city more beautiful is by Street Votes.)
Copenhagen: cycling
The Danish city is the Valhalla of bike users. It achieved this by completely transforming its previous car domination, and by making bicycle use safe and available. As a result, public health and happiness have hugely improved. Likewise Seville has turned itself into a leading cycling city, and even Paris has too.
It seems that if you ignore talk radio hosts and build bicycle lanes, it turns out best for everyone.
Glasgow: crime
Glasgow was until fairly recently the most homicidal city in western Europe, but it has drastically cut knife crime — thanks to Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit.
Frankfurt: architecture
Germany’s financial hub is rebuilding much of the medieval city destroyed by Allied aerial bombing in the war.
Like many bombed-out cities, Frankfurt initially rebuilt in modernist style, until they
concluded the place looked better the way it was before.
There’s no reason why we couldn’t do the same here with various buildings and streets destroyed either by the Luftwaffe or the more evil menace of 20th century town planners.
Venice: over-tourism
Overwhelmed by the number of tourists visiting, the Serene Republic has introduced a tourism tax to deter over-tourism and raise money. It was due to begin last summer, but unfortunately something else came along which effectively dealt with tourism, and it won’t start until next year now. Other cities will almost certainly follow suit.
Amsterdam: living streets
Amsterdam is the gold standard for bicycle-based transport policy, all the more impressive considering that in the early 1970s it was heavily car-dominated and had large numbers of pedestrian deaths.
More recently, it has also removed 10,000 parking spaces to create more room for bicycles and pedestrians.
Helsinki: homelessness
London’s homelessness problem is now a disgrace, and it’s got considerably worse since 2010. The Finns have, so far, tackled the problem better than anywhere else.
Singapore: traffic
Roads are a vital resource and car use has huge externalities for those living near them — where roads are in huge demand, car-users should pay a premium to use them.
Under the Singapore Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system, charges for entering the city centre vary by time of day and are periodically revised in order to maintain traffic speeds within the desirable bands.
London’s Congestion Zone reduces traffic and raises money, but it’s insensitive to where the most demand is. (Exceptions should be made for people who needs vans for work.)
Dublin: nightlife
The Irish Republic’s cities now have far more relaxed late night licensing laws, and plan to liberalise still further — when and if Ireland ever emerges from lockdown.
In Cork pubs are regularly open until 2am, while in London night life is still in many ways very restrictive.
Vilnius: street dining
The Lithuanian capital turned its streets into vast open-air cafes to help restaurants struggling with the Covid epidemic.
It seems reasonable that, in summer at least, restaurants in non-thoroughfares can take over the streets as standard and traffic diverted. Having seen the scenes of Soho’s streets being turned into open-air restaurants, do we really want cars to have that space back?
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SubscribeThe population of Copenhagen is 600,000. London is about 9 million. With those numbers, it is a mathematical impossibility to turn London into a bike-based city without either flattening place and and redesigning from the ground up or creating traffic clogged nightmare for the vast majority who will not (can not) use a bike. Sticking your head in the sand is no excuse for the disaster that is being willfully created by the “bike-friendly” cult in London.
Actually, though the population is a lot smaller, the land area is not proportionally larger. Neither is it possible to imagine a way to make London more cycle easy than Copenhagen. By creating a new class of electric bicycle allowed to travel at up to 20mph (say), with the priority lanes and routes to match, the vast majority of London is accessible to a Londoner writhing a shorter time than either car transport or public transport today.
The regulations would need to be very flexible – no licenses or helmets needed for ownership of such bikes, laws would need to protect cyclists (eg, as in France, you have to prove the cyclist was at fault, ie cyclists enjoy the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise), and the number of cycleways would need to be massively increased.
It’s all possible.
Upvoted with caveat about licenses and especially helmets for e-bikes. I’ve had too many friends badly hurt or even killed on regular bikes.
Nobody wears a helmet in Amsterdam. Nor do many of the very small kids who cycle around the city. It’s simply a case of planning and building the street architecture properly. But it all takes many, many years, and we all know that in London it will not be done properly anyway.
Not having visited, so I may be wrong, but isn’t the city cycling culture of Amsterdam somewhat different, with slower speeds and ‘town’ bikes as opposed to high-geared road models popular in the UK? My view is that a change in cycling behaviour matters as much as infrastructure.
Having come off a road bike at well over 20 mph (not in town), I find the suggestion above advocating motorised bikes with no regulations or helmets interesting; and why should anyone enjoy privilege under law? All of the above would simply lead to more irresponsible cycling (of which we have plenty already) by people wearing no protective equipment on powered vehicles, holding a sense of entitlement. None of this will not stop a kerbstone splitting your skull open and a surge in accidents and hospitalisations will be the unintended consequences.
I live in Germany. Cyclists wear helmets. We are not stupid
Yes, but the Dutch and Danes do not, and they cycle a lot more per head than the Germans!
Urban utility cycling for everyday life should not need helmets, fast road cycling on main roads for sport is a different thing, and helmets are treated just as part of the kit.
The statistical evidence for helmets overall is not compelling, forcing people to wear and carry them around in shops etc probably discourages cycling.
Do you think licenses or helmets would make a difference?
As a pedestrian, I’m not keen on hordes of 20mph bikers weaving and shouting; and as a father whose son fractured his skull on a bike whilst not wearing a helmet (no other vehicle involved) I’m not keen on those speedy hordes not wearing helmets. But it would not be difficult to do some minor redesigns of central London and of some major London hubs (e.g. Camden) to have much more separation of bikes, motor vehicles, and walkers, without the chaos that we seem to have achieved so far, and thus encourage bike use in safety, yet create conditions where motor traffic can still flow, complete with parking on hub edges. It needs a little money and a bit of thought. The latter seems completely unavailable at any level of local government, alas, so we will no doubt carry on with the present conflict and chaos.
Perhaps Danish cyclists are not homicidal maniacs, like too many of those in London.
I don’t defend aggressive cyclists, but your comment is just part of the hostile anti-cycling attitude too prevalent in this country. I think there are rather more ‘homicidal maniacs’ driving cars, you see some truly terrible driving breaking almost every Highway Code rule on a daily basis. The consequences of such bad driving of course is much worse than bad cycling, as the road safety statistics demonstrate.
Quite false!
The road safety statistics I’ve seen show that cycling as a whole is by far the most dangerous form of transport to its own users. Pedal cycling is only slightly less dangerous than motor cycling.
All forms of cycling are also more dangerous than motor cars to non-users.
Bikes need helmets, licences and most important, insurance. Same for electric scooters
A license? For a bicycle?? Oh dear. And insurance too? Shall they get number plates and have MOTs? Nobody will use the damn things if you try to treat bikes like motor vehicles. Now as for electric scooters, they can just be banned overnight.
Part of my Ward byelection,ban Escooters,they are menace & Some Are crime magnets,phones etc..
As long as cyclists are kept OFF pavements and punished harshly for any transgressions. I am sick of being nearly mown down by self righteous members of the cult.
Why doesn’t the Author of this piece ,take his sofa n a bike?..Londons population is closer to 9.5million only Pandemic has halted the rise..
Is that supposed to be a joke, the matched by an unmatched supply, or just doziness? (I will go for the latter.)
You know the other part of the phrase, Ed, supply and….demand?
In terms of housing that means people, y`know. That is the bit that is not increasing at a huge rate in Tokyo. They have immigrants – but not in gigantic numbers year after year after year.
The supply problem in the London area is a demand problem. Too many people flowing in.
Well I’ve lived in Frankfurt and enjoyed it very much, but I don’t see what is so special about the architecture there. I have also spent many years in A’dam and yes, the streets are very nice nut it is an ongoing process that began, as Ed suggests, 50 years ago. These things cannot be achieved overnight.
It should also be said that most of A’dam’s liveable streets are in the centre and only ‘liveable’ for those who can afford them, or who have managed to get a ‘social huurwoning’ one way or another. Beyond that, there are some pretty unpleasant ghettos andt the city’s murder rate among the drug gangs possibly exceeded that of London on a per capita basis in 2019.
Whatever, the fact is that Londoners are probably doomed to end up with some combination of Portland during the nightly riots, Naples during the garbage strike, Mumbai, and Beijing.
… sounds like an urban nightmare – let’s hope not.
The rejuvenation of the Frankfurt Altstadt has only been recently re-opened, so you may not have seen it. It’s very impressive.
Also the story of Tokyo solving its housing crisis is one of the most outrageous ever told. Tokyo real estate had become the most expencive in the world, then the biggest crash ever, and not a recovery yet:
“Between 1956 and 1986, the price of land increased by as much as 5,000 per cent in Japan. At the peak of the bubble economy, Tokyo real estate could sell for as much as US$139,000 per square foot, which was nearly 350 times as much as equivalent space in Manhattan. By that reckoning, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth as much as the entire US state of California.”
And now the prices have been stagnant for decades, but the really big issue has been the decreasing population in Japan, this is what made real estate stable after the HUGE correction – like UK would have had the same without immigration, this is where real estate will drop from the current peak in all but the developing world. This is why India will overtake China as the next Superpower a decade after China gets that place.
China and The West now have shrinking ‘working age’ demographics, and the housing crisis will soon alter to normalcy – but care homes will be needed by a factor of 5 soon.
Maybe more Karachi than Mumbai, and Beijing only in the sense of electronic monitoring.
I will say that Frankfurt’s Zeil is like Oxford St but a “Zeillion” times better according to my wife. And there are enough bars in the side streets to placate me.
We used Frankfurt as a mere plane/train interface for years until we decided to stay over a few times more recently, and really enjoyed it. The restaurant strip around Schweizer platz/strasse in Sachsenhausen is quite funky for a supposedly soulless modern city.
London has a problem. In the shires where I live we are forgetting about it. I knew it very well as a child and a young man and walked and rode all over it. I have never taken my rapidly growing grandchildren there. They never go and do not miss it. The knife crime and drug scene means their parents won’t allow it.
It does not matter if the chances of being involved are low it is the perception that matters. When I was young youth murders in London never happened or if they did it would have been a nationwide sensation. Sorry London no longer figures in our lives.
Would that mean the place their souls go when they have been run over and killed by a motorist? Surely the less pretentious paradise or heaven would have worked better?
I could do this with other topics, like restaurants. One would be best because of its ambience, one because of the service, one because of the steak course, one for its veggie offerings, one because it was cheap, one for its desserts, etc, etc. Terrible article.
Lighten up a bit dude, its supposed to be a bit of fun, not a blueprint for the future. Get a grip !
‘…it’s supposed to be a bit of fun’
No it wasn’t. It was a propaganda piece on behalf of aggressive, lycra-wearing, mostly men and a tirade against the car – the most liberating invention of all time for most people. If there is a single fear which all my older friends have in common it’s fear of cyclists whenever they walk outside their home. And this includes people who have never driven or owned a car in their life.
Yes, cars clutter the place dreadfully but they provide freedom and pleasure in vast amounts. Freedom in where people can work, freedom in where they can live, freedom in how they can spend their leisure. They vastly increase the accessibility of most needs of life – food, furniture, housing, health, entertainment – contact with family and friends.
Yes, their numbers now produce some negative consequences which may need addressing but mindless ‘Out now! All cars!’ is not the solution.
I wish I could upload this 100 times.
Glasgow? Crime? Glasgow?
Bath maybe, Anywhere but Glasgow.
Has he been there?
Or just read the doctored stats on the SNP website?
Have you been to any of these other cities? None of them have anything in common with London. Comparing apples and pears doesn’t even come close. More like comparing a jumbo jet with a dahlia.
As others have noted, the problem in the UK is that any changes made along these lines will be done in an utterly half-arsed manner resulting in a complete mess that’ll make everything worse. Just look at Edinburgh where I live. We have a notoriously cretinous council who have decided that they want to traffic-calm streets and create more bike lanes.
Instead of doing it in a holistic manner that takes into account how roads are actually used and where the problems actually lie, they arbitrarily close certain roads to car traffic, guaranteeing that surrounding streets are now permanent traffic jams (with an attendant increase in pollution and decrease in well-being), create bike lines that literally go nowhere and come to abrupt halts and redirect roads so that a normal, straight journey up and down a road is now a looping trip around multiple streets, which instead of slowing cars down, so enrages people that they tear around the streets much faster than they ever did before. As a pedestrian, a cyclist and a motorist, Edinburgh is a nightmare. And the potholes are horrific.
As a paying member, I did not sign on hoping to get “restaurant reviews” which – even as a restaurant review it would still fail. One looks for more depth that shows a bit more reflection. You cannot possibly tell me something significant about 10 cities in so short a space. You might as well have listed 10 cities and put 4 stars on each line. This just won’t do. I might as well just turn to Wikipedia for better research.
I would have been happy to have become a paying member but they did not reply when I asked if you could remove the ‘MEMBER’ banner after your name, which I did not like. But then I also asked if I could write the story of my encounter with Yetis (which really happened) wile camped alone very remote one winter, and they did not respond to that either.
The only thing which disappoints me of Unherd is how they fail to talk of the global economy as such loss of productivity and such a huge money supply increase, with the record stock prices, doubling of commodities, inflation massively of all hard assets, zero interest, bond market crazy, Zombie companies, National, corporate, and private debt, and so on, and where it will lead (CRASH) It is all about covid and the response, but NONE about what will result from the response.
Check out Curitiba. Under it’s mayor Jaime Lerner and his successors, it has become one of the best urban environments in the world
I looked it up, impressive.
Great article.
When they wanted to pedestrianize Trafalgar Square, people said it would cause enough traffic problems to bring down the government. Needless to say, after six months no-one even remembered what it was like before (it was awful).
You don’t need to be Wrath of Gnon to see that wherever you are going will be far better if everyone else isn’t going there by car.
Actually, I remember it was much worse after; the new flows were conflicting on a massive scale. They didn’t need to be, just no thought seemed to have gone into the new layout
Perhaps all these additional cyclists would like to make a financial contribution to the roads they will be using?
A great many cyclists (like me) are also vehicle drivers, so contribute to road upkeep by way of general taxation, as do non-vehicle driving cyclists. Also, VED ‘road tax’ is not hypothecated
“Homelessness” is mis-characterised.
Rough sleeping, begging and homelessness are three different issues, even if they overlap in many areas.
There is also a hidden problem with “invisible” homelessness – young people couch-surfing etc, but not necessarily bothering people on the street.
The visible rough-sleepers and beggars that we call homeless , quite logically gravitate to where wealth and services are and where begging is tolerated and where there is some community in numbers on the street. Many of them have been housed at times but drift back to life on the street.
If simply providing housing solved the problem, (as implied in your Finland link) there are plenty of post-industrial towns in North of England and Central Belt Scotland with surplus housing.
But not a lot of cash.
Basil Chamberlain will you not enter this debate? You know as much as any man on this subject, perhaps more!
This appears to be a re-work of The Spirit Level, or at least an application of similar methodology. Take one idea with no regard for the wider context or development within a specific culture.
What if we spun the wheel of misfortune and each of those cities was judged on the virtue of another, would it still look like a good list?
I mean, I’d be surprised if London wasn’t good at something. (I hope it’s pubs!)
Tokyo as an exemplar for housing?? Not even funny.
If you really believe in reduced control producing better outcomes, travel a bit more. Houston has almost zero planning controls and has nearly the most affordable housing in the USA. It is rarely seen in the ‘Most Liveable City’ league tables however – and neither is Tokyo.
I’ve been banging on about this years but the idiot politicians think constantly reinventing the square wheel is a great idea. Now, throw money at the people who run these systems in other countries and give them carte blanche to the do same here… I would argue we should copy Japan for most of the topics listed…
after we overthrow our current Nazi COVID-fascist police state.