London Leading The Race For Cycle-To-Work Schemes, But How Much Could Commuters Look To Save Swapping The Car For A Bike?
Greater London is leading the way in terms of cycle-to-work schemes across England, according to research from one of the UK’s leading bike retailers.
According to the data, around 1.5% of all commuters in the Greater London area regularly cycle to work – equating to roughly 129k Londoners. Research shows the second-best region for cyclist commuters is the East of England with around 67k people taking their bike to work or approximately 1.1% of all commuters in that area.
The research comes from Planet X, who created a unique scoring system to understand which regions of England show the most interest in the cycle-to-work scheme.
In addition to looking at the percentage of the workforce for each region that commutes by bike, the company also looked at the average number of monthly Google searches for the term ‘Cycle To Work Schemes’ and the amount of pedal cycle traffic for each area.
London performed well across all criteria, having the second highest interest in potential schemes with just over 8,100 Google searches every month.
The region also has the second highest levels of cycle traffic, only slightly behind the South West, with cyclists contributing to around one hundred and twenty million kilometres (per 1,000,000 population) in 2021 alone.
Planet X also looked at the potential savings each commuter stands to make by opting to cycle to work instead of commuting via car.
According to their estimates, Londoners who cycle in everyday could be saving over £135 every year based on a 10-mile journey to work.
What’s more, is that figure is based on the current average cost of fuel (1.62p per litre) meaning that if the price of petrol were to reach the same heights as last summer, the potential savings could be much higher.
Hester Gebbels, Marketing Manager at Planet X, adds: “There are a number of benefits to cycling to work, not only is regular exercise such as cycling great for your physical and mental health but it could potentially save you a fair bit of money each month and help you to reduce your carbon footprint.”
Based on the above example of a typical 10-mile commute, choosing to cycle instead of taking the car would save 780 kg per year in CO2. If we take that figure for everyone currently commuting by bike in London that’s 101 tonnes of CO2 saved every year, to put that into perspective that’s the equivalent of 30 return flights from London to Hong Kong or one hundred people using their phone for an hour every day for a year.