“Madness”, “potentially serious consequences”… while some politicians and transport experts fear the worst over the Met’s ‘reorganisation’ and scrapping of its cycle safety team, George Hill is trying to see the positives
It was reported last week that the MET is disbanding its specialist cycling and motorbike safety units. When I first heard this, my natural response was that it was going to have serious implications for the safety of cyclists in our capital. When you look at the headlines around the number of deaths and serious injuries from cycling in the last few years, this seems like an even more bizarre decision. After all, when serious injuries go up, surely that’s a road safety issue that these units were designed specifically to counter?
If you only look at the surface level, then absolutely, this makes no sense whatsoever; actually, it looks horrific. The number of people seriously killed or injured whilst cycling on London’s roads is still in the thousands, with more than two people every day on average getting seriously injured. Even when you put that into the context of more people riding, the likelihood of being killed or seriously injured has still gone up.
However, when you dig into those numbers and think about what they mean, I think they paint a very different picture.
First off, the KSI figure is commonly used by the media as it sounds more dramatic – it makes you think that there are thousands of cyclists in the morgue, when actually, the number of cyclists killed is down by 50% since 2014, and cyclists are 23% less likely to be injured in the same time period. Indeed, over the last few years, the number of cyclists killed on the roads has been in single figures. That means that of the roughly 550 million journeys made by bike every year in the capital, a total of 0.0000016% resulted in a fatal incident.
There is no denying that the number of cyclists injured has increased. Still, there is also no distinction in the numbers between injuries that would be negated by police action, or a serious injury that occurs because somebody has injured themselves or others through poor road craft or inexperience.
I only had one injury when I was riding in London, which was when another rider, who was new to cycling, cut across me and knocked me off. There are millions more people on bikes today, thanks to services like Lime and Santander Cycles, who are far more likely to both cause injury or injure themselves because they are inexperienced riders cycling on heavy bikes that are difficult to control.
The question we need to ask is, would having a specialist unit operating in the way it does now have any positive impact on these numbers?
I honestly don’t think it would.
We have seen astounding improvements in cycle safety, not because of bobbies in the saddle, but because London has invested a huge amount in infrastructure that has made cycling so much safer. I know this having ridden in London before, during, and after these infrastructure changes.
Riding up Blackfriars Road was a route I was forced to take because it was the quickest way over the river to get to my office. In 2011 that was a deathtrap, and I would recommend that new cyclists avoid it even if it took longer. Today, I think it’s possibly the safest road for cyclists in the capital.
In 2026, I can get from almost anywhere in the capital to the various centres of London using separated bike paths, whereas before I was battling homicidal cabbies, and having my head on swivel for lorries with poorly positioned mirrors.
So, while the headlines make it seem like we’re losing out and the shallow data makes it look like an odd decision, look behind the bluster and you don’t see a failure in decision-making, you see the success of infrastructure and long-term strategic planning. A police officer isn’t going to stop an inexperienced cyclist from renting a Lime bike and riding into the back of a bus, like they famously did in May 2025. However, town planning has meant that these same people are more likely to be injured through their own actions rather than the actions of bad drivers.