As the Conservative Party Conference wraps up in Manchester, much has been made of the back-and-forth between previous Tory Mayor of London, Boris Johnson and current Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan, particularly over Transport for London (TfL)’s poor finances.
Mr Johnson, current Prime Minister, claimed in an ITV London interview that: “Sadiq Khan has not handled the finances of TfL well.”
That comes after MyLondon reported in March that Johnson’s plans for a ‘garden bridge’ in Central London cost TfL £24million, more than half of the entire amount it spent on London’s bridges for a decade, despite never being built.
Now, cycling is at the top of TfL’s agenda, with e-bikes set to be introduced to its cycle hire scheme next year and Cycleways 4 and 9 currently under construction.
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Mr Johnson had a very different idea about cycling in the capital, including one very expensive project which also never materialised. Fresh from the Olympic Games, in 2012 the ex-Mayor endorsed plans for the capital’s railway and Tube lines to have giant cycleways built on top of them.
That was until he had to quash the idea after he was advised it would be simply too expensive.
The project, called SkyCycle, was initially the brainchild of the architecture firm Exterior Architecture, which went on to win the Southwark Low Line competition in 2019 to redesign the area underneath the railway arches around Southwark Street.
Architecture firm Foster + Partners, who have designed London landmarks such as the Millennium Bridge then came onboard to push the project forward.
At the time, Sam Martin & Oli Clark of Exterior Architecture said: “SkyCycle is an urban cycling solution for London. A cycling utopia, with no buses, no cars and no stress.
“We are incredibly excited at how together with Foster + Partners our idea has been developed and now more recently turned into a truly world changing scenario by Space Syntax for revolutionising cycling in London and possibly the world.”
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A map on the Exterior Architecture website suggests the train lines the cycleways would have been built on top of included:
- London Bridge to Dartford via Sidcup
- London Bridge to East Croydon via Sydenham
- Waterloo to Surbiton via Clapham Junction
- Wembley Central to East Croydon via Clapham Junction
- Wembley Central to Kilburn High Road
- Edgware to West Hampstead Thameslink
- West Drayton to Paddington
- Shoreditch/Liverpool Street to Dalston/Enfield/Chadwell Heath/Dagenham
- The City to Canning Town
- Hampstead Heath to Walthamstow via Gospel Oak and South Tottenham
The cycleways would have been tolled or would require users to tap in/out on their Oyster cards to use them, with a likely corporate sponsor.
Some cycleways would have been easier to construct than others – unusually for South East London which is a public transport desert in some respects, railway lines there are electrified via a third rail on the track instead of an overhead wire meaning it would have likely been one of the first areas to see construction.
Road.cc, the cycling and motorist online publication, reported in 2012 that when Boris Johnson faced an LBC phone-in at the end of the year, he had to quash the idea.
The ex-mayor said: “It would be fantastically expensive. I don’t actually think as a cyclist it is what the city needs, what we need is more safety measures, we need better roads, we need better protection for cyclists of all kinds, we need better investment in our streets and that’s what we’re doing.”
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The idea was slammed by urban planners and transport experts who did not believe it would deliver the capacity designers claimed would be as much as Crossrail 2.
The ex-mayor had given into the cycling lobby’s demands to remove bendybuses from London’s streets despite the overwhelming disaster their replacement ‘Boris buses’ turned out to be, costing more, carrying fewer passengers, all having to be retro-fitted with openable windows due to air-con failures and a second version which no bus operator wanted.
Meanwhile bendybuses continue to operate around the UK, and some have even been doubling up as vaccination centres in Brighton and Hertfordshire.
There are no current plans to revive SkyCycle, and TfL is to continue the current Mayor Sadiq Khan’s policy of cycling superhighways and StreetSpace Low Traffic Neighbourhoods to make cycling safer and get Londoners on their bikes.
Do you think SkyCycle is worth reviving? Tell us in the comments below!
You can read MyLondon’s cycling coverage on our dedicated page here.
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https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/boris-johnsons-failed-plan-put-21796508
