Fact check: are cycle lanes really making traffic worse?

London is the most congested city in the world and it’s the cycle lanes wot done it. That is the impression you will pick up from the headlines this morning. 

‘Cycle Lanes Blamed as City Named Most Congested,’ reads a BBC headline, to take but one example. The story emerges, it turns out, from a global index published by transport consultancy Inrix, which claims that motorists in London spent an average of 148 hours in traffic jams this year, more than in any other country in the world. In the past year, the city climbed from being the 16^th most-congested of those studied to the most congested of that lot.

But are the cycle lanes hurriedly put in during the lockdown, to provide for people to get about when they might not want to cram onto trains and buses, really to blame? It is true that Peter Lees, operations director at Inrix, has comments that the installation of cycle lanes has had ‘a negative impact on congestion’.