The Observer: "Superhighway to cycling heaven – or just a hell of a mess?"

"As London’s network of cycle lanes takes shape, we ask whether Boris Johnson's transport revolution was blue-lane thinking or a convoluted mistake"

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"They are 'doing more damage to London,' said the former chancellor Lord Lawson in the House of Lords, 'than almost anything since the Blitz.' In the same spirit of absurdist hyperbole, they might be said to be the most transformative public works since Joseph Bazalgette built London's sewers and river embankments.

"They are not, but they do have the potential to change the spirit and character of the capital and of other cities that follow the same path, as well as making its transport cleaner, healthier, safer, more efficient and better able to deal with growing pressure of numbers. They might even prove that the city’s former mayor Boris Johnson was capable of doing something right.

“ 'They' are the cycle superhighways, the most conspicuous of several measures promoted under Johnson. They add up to an unprecedented plan, which is to make the sprawling, awkward, inconsistent city of London bike-friendly. The places most often cited for the exemplariness of their cycling provision – Amsterdam, Copenhagen, more recently Manhattan – were already more ordered, compact and coherent in their layout. In London, the street pattern changes moment by moment, straight to winding, leafy to truck-thronged, wide to narrow."