Learning from typical cities: what German cities can teach us about Britain's transport problem
Written by Charlie Hicks.
A suburb in Leeds. Photo credit: Duncan Cuthbertson / iStock
Cycling accounts for 11 per cent of all trips in Germany. In England, it is 2 per cent. Car use here is seven percentage points higher. And over the past two decades, that gap has only widened.
New research from LSE Cities asks why, and what English cities can do about it. The study takes a deliberately unfamiliar approach: rather than focusing on Amsterdam or Copenhagen, Berlin or London, it compares ten "typical mobility cities" in England including Leeds, Coventry, Sunderland and Stevenage with ten counterparts in Germany, such as Dortmund, Mainz and Osnabrück. Places comparable in scale and economic character but diverging sharply in how people travel.
The findings are striking. Over the past two decades, typical German cities have seen meaningful modal shift away from cars, with cycling rising sharply. Their English counterparts have barely moved. Car commuting still dominates, cycling remains marginal, and bus use has declined.
The research points to three interlocking factors. The first is urban form. Cities where jobs, retail and services are concentrated in accessible centres have far greater potential for sustainable travel than those where employment is scattered across out-of-town business parks and retail sheds. Decades of planning decisions that pushed development to the urban periphery have locked in car dependency in ways that are genuinely difficult to reverse.
The second is infrastructure, but not infrastructure alone. The Stevenage case is instructive: the town was built with a fully segregated cycle network designed to accommodate 40 per cent of all trips by bicycle. Today, cycling accounts for just 3 per cent. The network failed not because it didn't exist, but because it routed cyclists away from roads through underpasses perceived as unsafe, while car infrastructure remained fast and convenient. Providing infrastructure is necessary but not sufficient; prioritising the interests of non-motorists is what shifts behaviour.
The third factor is governance. German cities have historically had substantially greater control over transport infrastructure, land use and local economic planning. The German Verkehrsverbund model integrates fares, timetables and routes across public transport operators, producing the kind of seamless network that makes active travel genuinely competitive with the car. England's fragmented, frequently reorganised and poorly-resourced local government structures have repeatedly undermined this kind of long-term, coordinated planning.
The policy brief calls for stronger restrictions on peripheral retail development, updated transport appraisal frameworks, deeper devolution of transport powers to mayoral strategic authorities, and improved city-level travel data which Germany collects routinely but England barely does at all.
The research is timely. The Government's newly published integrated national transport strategy, Better Connected, sets out an ambitious vision for modal shift. Ben Plowden and Philipp Rode, the authors of the policy brief, argue that ambition without a credible theory of change risks becoming another document gathering dust on a ministerial shelf. The current wave of English devolution, and the creation of mayoral strategic authorities, represents a genuine structural opportunity but it requires political will to match the stated ambition.
Read Ben Plowden and Philipp Rode's discussion of the findings on the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. The full policy brief, Learning from cities with typical mobility, is published by LSE Cities. This research project was funded by the RAC Foundation.