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Cyclists make up a quarter of London traffic, official census finds

London cyclists have long suspected that there were far more riders on the streets of the capital than the authorities gave credit for, and new figures from Transport for London finally confirm it, with cyclists a staggering 64 percent of peak hour traffic on one road.

A newspaper reports that a new census of cycling in London has found that one in four road users in the morning rush hour is a cyclist, and that the proportion is even higher on some popular routes.

Theobalds Road, Holborn takes the gong as London’s most bike-trafficked street, with bikes making up 64 percent of vehicles in the morning peak. Other streets full of bike commuters include Kennington Park Road between Kennington and Oval, with 57 percent bikes and Old Street, Shoreditch at 49 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of cyclists crossing the city’s bridges, as there’s no alternative (short of a substantial detour to breathe fumes in the Rotherhithe Tunnel). Blackfriars, Waterloo and London bridges are the fourth, fifth and sixth busiest streets for cyclists. Riders make up 42 per cent of traffic on these bridges and 15 per cent of people, but take up just 12 per cent of road space.

Bike trips doubled

Previous Transport for London showed that cyclists make 570,000 trips in London every day, almost double the 2001 figure of 290,000. Across the day, bikes make up 16 percent of all road traffic in London.

In the latest census, bicycles were the majority of vehicles on the road at 29 of 164 monitoring stations

For the Mayor’s office, these figures are strong ammunition to protect Boris Johnson’s proposed £913 million-worth of cycling schemes against possible cuts in Transport for London’s budget.

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