Since the 1950s, bicycle use has declined. The one overwhelming reason is that decades of road construction, widening, and “improvement”, coupled with the advances in car technology that put machines designed for the autobahn on British city streets and country lanes, have given us a network of hostile and frightening barriers to cycling. Cities and countries which today have mass cycling — Copenhagen and the Netherlands being the leading examples — did not escape the rise of the motor car. In the 1970s, they too were discovering the many negative consequences of mass car use, and they too were seeing the rapid abandonment of cycling as transport in response to hostile road conditions. But they have since halted and are reversing that decline.
