Given that Stevenage seems to be the exemplar du jour of the UK’s unique culture, wedded to the motorcar and impossible to persuade to use a bicycle — a representative sample of the English attitude and environment, and definitely not just a self-selected population of suburbanites in an anomalistic mid-20th century planned-for-cars high-capacity motorway town — I was curious about just how well its transport culture compared to the rest of England, and particularly the places with the greatest potential for cycling: its cities. So I took a quick peek at the 2011 census data, to make a change from using the NTS in these things. Turns out that Stevenage is perhaps representative of the top quintile of most car-dependent districts — and even then, probably only really the Milton Keyneses, Swindons, South Gloucestershires and Bracknells. Local cycling campaigns can perhaps make up their own minds whether their town, or the people in it, is really anything like Stevenage.
