Thomas van Laake, doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester
First published in Royal Town Planning Institute
Transformative change takes time. Nearly seven years on from the launch of the agenda-setting ‘Made to Move’ strategy, which set out Greater Manchester’s target of becoming ‘the very first city region [with] a fully joined up cycling and walking network’, the practical and political difficulties of ensuring a cycling-inclusive future for the city region are coming into focus.
Despite the ambitious targets put in place, travel surveys reveal that cycling mode share has stagnated at 2 percent,[1] far below the 10 percent target for 2025 set by the Greater Manchester Cycling Strategy (in 2014). Meanwhile, infrastructure delivery has been hamstrung by political opposition to reductions in parking spaces and removing space for motor vehicles. Unlike many global peers, the city region failed to make the most of the historic opportunity to promote cycling during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Granted, there have been national political headwinds ranging from bizarre conspiracy theories around Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and 15-minute cities to the Conservatives’ electioneering ‘war on the motorist’ rhetoric. Nonetheless, the devolution experiment that has enabled Greater Manchester’s cycling network vision held out the promise of transformative governance at the metropolitan scale, and warrants evaluating on its own terms. The considerable gap between city region policy targets and the realities of delivery in austerity-hit local authorities begs the question of whether current governance arrangements are working as intended.
“Like England, Greater Manchester has its richer south, [..] its great main city of hedonism and cranes and sky-high rents, and its decapitalised, struggling northern towns.”
In this sense, the city region replicates, in miniature, the challenge faced by policymakers at higher levels of government: the delivery of a coherent pro-cycling policy across geographical differences.
With these dilemmas in mind, this article positions Greater Manchester (henceforth GM) as a model case of how pro-cycling reforms play out across heterogeneous agglomerations, i.e. a city region made up of various towns and cities with individual characteristics. I argue that while devolution has enabled the launch of an ambitious cycling policy, the coordination of delivery at the city region scale foregrounds tensions between common visions and their implementation in differently situated contexts. As a new national government refocuses investment in active travel and Andy Burnham launches his third mayoral term, policymakers and advocates across GM and the wider UK could learn important lessons from the development and trajectory of the city region’s cycling policy.
A cycling model for a model city region
Cycling infrastructure is not a new phenomenon in the valley of the Mersey. Ample segregated, cycle tracks built in the pre-war era continue to grace roads across Trafford (see Figure 1). Alas, as cycling regained relevance to transport planners in the latter decades of the 20th century, local authorities tended to deliver low quality facilities and did not make progress towards a coherent network at the council, let alone city region scale.
Lostock Road, in the contemporary borough of Trafford. From Carlton Reid’s research on historical cycle infrastructure
The evident futility of this amateurish and occasionally ‘mad’ approach to cycling provision has long been recognised by decision makers. A breakthrough for the quality and impact of interventions arrived in Manchester’s selection for a Cycle City Ambition Grant (awarded 2013), which helped deliver the Oxford Road-Wilmslow Road corridor as part of the wider Velocity 2025 plan. These efforts saw planners learn from and reference cases of international ‘best practice’ ranging from upcoming Berlin and the well-established Netherlands.[2]
Devolution has only strengthened the aspiration for ‘world class’ infrastructure. However, the Bee Network vision has seen Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) develop its own model of pro-cycling intervention, one explicitly suited to the city region’s strengths and challenges. Certainly, this approach has drawn heavily on London’s experience, hiring former TfL cycling expert Brian Deegan during the initial years of the Bee Network’s development. However, the city region now boasts its own street reconfiguration standards (Streets for All) and policy partnerships for delivering specific targets such as Vision Zero (Safer Roads partnership) and access to cycling (GM Moving).
Indeed, GM’s position in policy learning hierarchies may be reversing. As England’s leading site of devolution, the city region has been positioned as an example on areas from spatial planning to social policy. Decision makers have consciously leaned into this role; for instance, the city region’s cycling plan was titled ‘Change a region to change a nation’, with Burnham explicitly stating his aim of developing “a model that can be replicated across the rest of the country.”[3] Deegan and his boss Chris Boardman, the city-region’s first active travel commissioner, have moved on to determine national policy at Active Travel England (ATE) as, respectively, director of inspections and commissioner, taking lessons from their time at GM with them. Meanwhile, the CYCLOPS intersection configuration developed by TfGM engineers and tested on GM streets is being replicated by local authorities across the UK, including leading ‘cycling cities’ such as Cambridge.
A heterogeneous city region
Nonetheless, rather than presenting a policy package ready to copy and paste, GM might best be understood as a model in a different sense – as a ‘test case’ of how to deliver a transition to cycling at the metropolitan scale, working across a heterogeneous set of atypical contexts far removed from inner London or, indeed, Cambridge. As James Meek has suggested in his incisive account of the city’s housing crisis, the city region might productively be understood as a ‘scale model’ of the wider nation, not least given the evident geographical parallels: “Like England, Greater Manchester has its richer south, [..] its great main city of hedonism and cranes and sky-high rents, and its decapitalised, struggling northern towns.”[4] In this sense, the city region replicates, in miniature, the challenge faced by policymakers at higher levels of government: the delivery of a coherent pro-cycling policy across geographical differences.
In expanding programs of infrastructural reconfiguration across a heterogeneous city region like GM, planners and policymakers face a ‘chicken or egg’ problem: should infrastructure be prioritised in areas with the highest current or potential demand, or rather be deployed to grow demand in areas without high levels of cycling? In previous decades, plans for high-quality cycling infrastructure had focused on connections within and to central zones. For instance, the ‘Vélocity 2025’ plan (funded by the CCAG grant) envisioned a centripetal network of routes to facilitate commuter travel into central Manchester. The contemporary prioritisation of higher-demand corridors such as the Chorlton Cycleway and the city-centre cycle hire scheme demonstrate that this planning logic, which both responds to and accentuates the already divergent conditions for cycling across the city region, continues to inform decision making.
The Velocity ‘Hub and Spoke’ plan
However, the coordination of cycling policy at the city region scale has considerably expanded the scope of cycling interventions and thereby changed logics of infrastructure provision. TfGM has sought to develop high-impact cycling projects in all constituent local authorities, following the combined authority’s (GMCA) consensus-based political calculus that distributes funds and support fairly across the city region. All constituent councils have signed up to the common infrastructure vision and, in return, have seen some level of investment with initial plans aiming to develop a cycling corridor, CYCLOPS intersection, and Active Neighbourhood (LTN) in each local authority. Notwithstanding these distributive intentions, however, the realities of delivery have evidenced that this common program of infrastructural reconfiguration lands unevenly across the city region.
While devolution holds out the promise of coordinated, coherent policy across the city region, it has not dissolved the ten constituent councils. Significant differences in institutional capacity and political support for cycling between local authorities have strongly influenced how the GM network vision plays out. While central boroughs such as Manchester and Salford can deploy a considerable planning apparatus to deliver projects and develop locally adapted plans, many outlying boroughs are hamstrung by staff shortages and a lack of cycling-specific expertise. Moreover, the common policy spans a heterogeneous region marked by disparate mobility situations and divergent processes of urbanisation and socio-economic development, which heavily mediate the potential for transformative change. Cycling interventions align particularly well with the redevelopment and intensification of city centres, which tends to increase density, provides opportunities to completely redesign infrastructure, and delivers funds to do so through section 106 contributions. On the other hand, the smaller towns and suburban developments on the outer reaches of the agglomeration are much less amenable to pro-cycling policy. Tellingly, the growing Walk Ride GM campaign boasts 13 local groups in Manchester, while Bury and Tameside feature only one group, and Wigan has none. Though advocates have recognised the need to push the campaign into different spaces, demographic and cultural differences across the city region make this a challenging proposition.
Differences and boundaries
The uneven implementation of GM’s cycling policies illustrates how transport transitions are mediated by spatial differences. To some, these divergent outcomes foreground the need to adapt policy and design approaches to suit local conditions, rather than attempt to replicate ‘what works’ in the urban core. Certainly, advocates and planners working in areas such as North Manchester and GM’s outer boroughs are often aware of their particular problems and opportunities. For instance, Wigan Council has emphasised off-road routes, which suit the borough’s lower-density environment and respond to their greater concern with resident health (rather than city-centre congestion). Such considerations indicate that plans for the city-region wide expansion of the Starling bicycle hire system, currently operating in central areas of Manchester, Trafford, and Salford, are not likely to represent good value for money. Instead, in most of the agglomeration, access to cycling might be best improved by bike libraries and cycle training targeted to vulnerable communities.[5]
Multi-use trail alongside Leigh guided busway, Wigan. Photo by author.
However, the differentiation of cycling interventions across GM does not always represent a benefit. Under political pressure, councils have sought to lower the ambition of schemes; as in the case of Stockport’s preference for light-touch crossing improvements and back routes, with underwhelming proposals for the A6 proving particularly controversial among advocates. Here, TfGM’s design review panel (DRP) plays an important role in ensuring funds are well spent and departures from standard practice is justified strategically, rather than simply convenient politically. Nonetheless, TfGM’s lack of control over the main road network is a significant barrier to progress on a GM-wide cycling network.
As any cyclist passing from Salford’s red cycle tracks to Manchester’s green will attest, some differences are simply cosmetic. However, the Irwell also marks the boundary of the Lime e-scooter system, which has been unable to expand into Manchester proper due to the conditions of the national trial. Indeed, despite city region devolution, local authority boundaries continue to frustrate cross-jurisdictional policy coordination. Councils are often working in parallel on the same problem, as in the case of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras for School Streets, first approved in Oldham and now underway across the city-region. These inefficiencies are further compounded by the debilitating effect of austerity measures and the cumbersome grant funding system, both of which significantly limit councils’ ability to sustain policies over the time necessary for change to happen.
Lessons and take-aways
This article has emphasised the challenges TfGM’s cycling planners face in extending cycling policies and infrastructure projects across a heterogeneous urban area marked by significant inequality, divergent processes of (sub)urbanisation, and local governments atrophied by austerity. In addressing the legacies of uncoordinated and unambitious cycling improvements, the delivery of GM’s cycling vision has foregrounded the new problems and dynamics associated with devolution.
The rescaling of policy holds the potential for policy innovation as well as more effective coordination. In addition to GM’s cycling plans, the potential for devolved governments to enact ambitious action on transport was borne out by the Welsh Government’s 20mph speed limit policy. However, as this article has shown, the impacts of the rescaling of policy are complex, and relate to broader questions of political legitimacy, the relation of abstract expertise to local knowledge, expanding dynamics of urbanisation and interregional mobility, and so on. Accordingly, rather than a ‘prototype’ to replicate, GM’s city region scale governance of cycling might better be understood as a ‘scale model’ of the balance between shared goals and local implementation, and the associated trade-offs between standardisation and differentiation.
Thomas van Laake is an urban geographer interested in understanding the production and circulation of policy knowledge and practice at multiple scales of urban sustainability transitions. His research has focused on the heterogeneous contexts for the promotion of urban cycling. Originally from the Netherlands, he lived in Bogotá, Colombia for four years, where he worked on projects related to cycling infrastructure and sustainable mobility policy in Latin America.
Since 2021, he has been undertaking doctoral research at the University of Manchester, developing a comparative analysis of cycling infrastructure implementation in Manchester, Mexico City, and Toronto.
[1] TfGM Travel Diary Surveys 2022, published April 2024
[2] Sheldrick, A., Evans, J., & Schliwa, G. (2017). Policy learning and sustainable urban transitions: Mobilising Berlin’s cycling renaissance. Urban Studies, 54 (12), 2739-2762.
[3] TfGM, 2020. Change a region to change a nation: Greater Manchester’s walking and cycling investment plan.
[4] James Meek, ‘Market Forces and Malpractice’, London Review of Books Vol. 46, No. 13, 4 July 2024.
[5] Thomas van Laake, ‘Micromobility and the city region’. Walk Ride GM blog, 1 July 2024.