Green revolution? UK cities have only ‘weeks’ to design life after lockdown, warns Chris Boardman

You have probably seen the images of once-fogged cities now lit up in glistening HD: the lifted smog over Delhi revealing a city in crystal-clear focus; Venice freed from a cloud of pollution; Los Angeles’ empty freeways no longer fading to grey but stretching out over a bright horizon.

Perhaps we should consider it a silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic that lockdown has momentarily deep-cleaned the air and unclogged our urban space, but the fact it took a disease to rediscover so many lost sights is just another tragedy in the story. In the game of life maybe the planet is showing us what we could have won, had we made better choices along the way: never mind, you’re still taking home suffocating pollution, irretrievable climate change and widespread respiratory damage. Thanks for playing!

Those startling images have at least sent a jolt around the globe, and some cities are taking radical steps to ensure this greener world is part of the future. Paris is rolling out 650km of ‘corona cycleways’, a project rushed forward from 2024 to beat post-lockdown congestion. Milan is undertaking hugely ambitious plans to reallocate road space from cars to cyclists and pedestrians, plotting wider pavements, new cycle lanes and lower speed limits. Pop-up cycle lanes are appearing everywhere from Berlin and Budapest to Bogota, partly to help key workers get around, but also to seize the momentum towards a lifestyle less reliant on cars.

In the UK, progress on this front has been limited so far. There was Brighton, which earlier this month became the first city to close a major road to cars in favour of cyclists and pedestrians, while legislation was loosened last week in order to help local authorities quickly pass measures like traffic-exclusion zones, something Lambeth Council has seized upon. But there are few groundbreaking announcements, no radical long-term initiatives, and time is running out.

“It’s a chance to redefine ‘normal’, but we’ve only got weeks to do it,” warns Chris Boardman. The former professional cyclist won Olympic gold at Barcelona in 1992, and is a passionate advocate for a greener way of life in his role as Manchester’s walking and cycling commissioner. He has long campaigned for better cycling infrastructure and improved safety on the roads, a cause close to his heart after his mother died when she was knocked off her bike by a pick-up truck in 2016.

“I am studiously avoiding utilising the word ‘opportunity’ because thousands of people are dying right now. But we would be crazy to ignore some of the things that are happening around us which we would love to be part of a new normal.”

Manchester is something of an outlier: even before the pandemic, Boardman was already leading major plans for a 1,800-mile network of pathways linked by ‘filtered neighbourhoods’ which prioritise pedestrians and cyclists. But this appetite is not matched by every city, and if anything the experience of China hints that life in the UK could spring back the other way once lockdown is lifted: Wuhan has seen a surge in car sales after lockdown as people avoid congested public transport – a short-term economic boost with a long-term environmental cost.

“Right now is a critical period to prepare for that [eventuality],” Boardman says. “In China they can see that the potential for a bounce back to even higher levels of car use is absolutely huge – unless you give people an alternative.”

Now is the time to take advantage of loosened regulations. “You can make plans for a filtered neighbourhood, for example, and normally you would have to go through a whole consultation period. But right now you can say ‘We’re going to implement it in seven days’. Then you have an opportunity to say to people ‘This has been in place during lockdown. Do you want to keep it?’”

From an urban research perspective, lockdown is one extraordinary experiment. At the Newcastle Urban Observatory, data collected from more than 20,000 sensors across cities in the north of England revealed that reduction in road traffic has caused a 25 per cent fall in NO2 levels – the pollutant chugged out by motor vehicles which damages our lungs. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to provide quantitative data on the impacts [of traffic flows],” says Philip James, professor of urban data at Newcastle University. “If we were serious about the climate emergency and said ‘We’re thinking of reducing the capacity of cars in Newcastle city centre by half, what will be the impact?’ Well, now we can tell you.”

The research into this new greener life is vast and detailed, but the question is whether policy makers have the time – and resources – to listen right now. “The people at the city council are understandably so bloody busy, no one’s drawn breath yet,” adds Professor James. “The other concern is that councils and indeed the government are having to put their hands deep into pockets that were pretty bare anyway, so money that may have been put aside for the climate emergency, or net-zero emission targets, some of those things unfortunately will have to be re-examined.”

The focus around the UK is understandably on the short-term crisis facing the NHS, but it is also true that there may never be a better opportunity to improve our long-term health and help relieve the cost of inactivity, something which is estimated to cost £7bn per year. The public will for a greener lifestyle is evidenced most clearly by the uptake of cycling, with around double the number of bikes on the streets in a normal day, and Boardman believes there is no reason why redesigning our urban spaces with cyclists and pedestrians at heart cannot complement life after lockdown.

“We have a situation the likes of which we’ve never seen, where you’ve turned off car use globally. It sounds melodramatic when you hear that, but it’s a fact. We’ve turned off car use, or certainly rolled it back 70 years, and people are choosing for themselves [to cycle]. If you genuinely want to help protect the NHS, this wonderful slogan that’s going around, this is how you do it, now and for the future.”

Cities face a critical moment in time, in what the former New York transport commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan described as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a fresh look at the streets”. Time is running out to make a difference. “The scary thing is that we’ve only got weeks,” adds Boardman. “And I’m not sure which way we’re going to choose.”