Recent arguments have been made in these pages and in the larger community regarding cycling that need addressing.

There are too many fallacies and examples of myopic, uncreative thinking evident in arguments opposed to a progressive cycling policy for Enfield.

First, business-owners along Green Lanes have raised concern that they will lose trade if the handful of parking spaces along each parade is lost. If the very limited amount of customers produced by these few spaces is the basis for these businesses’ plans for success, no wonder the economic outlook for local business can seem bleak, like a cause that needs to be treated as a charity, as opposed to a model for success.

As long as cars are the default form of transport, the default choice for consumers will be the big stores with their ridiculously-scaled car parks.

In case after case of communities shifting to bicycle and public transport-centred planning, local businesses flourish in unprecedented ways impossible to imagine beforehand. Decades of studies prove this in dozens of cities across three continents, and in fact the LSE published statistics recently demonstrating the economic dividends the UK economy has already seen from the merest incremental increase in cycling.

Helen Osman raised the specific case of local taxi firms; the issue for these cars taking our elders where they need to go is not bicycles, but other cars. Diversify transport and taxis too will have an easier time of it. This is the long-term thinking that results in economic success; not digging in for a less-than-satisfactory status quo. Want local businesses to thrive? Invest in cycling.

Second, we need a model that is not Holland. The Netherlands has never shifted its culture in this way as the Dutch have always been (since the bicycle was invented) for cycling, people pragmatic as they are. Denmark on the other hand embraced the automobile in the nation’s post-war economic boom, but then made the decision as a culture to become more bike-centred when its people were becoming unmanageably unhealthy, causing impossible strain on its national health system, and its environment was becoming revoltingly unlivable. Now Denmark is deeply sustainable, has a solvent healthcare system and is a tourist draw to boot. The potential benefits of using a model like Denmark and shifting in this way are numerous and far-reaching.

And for the elders of our community who assume that cycling is a young person’s thing (G A Musey, I refer respectfully to your letter), this I find tragic. Like fish indicate the health of a river, children and elders out in our streets indicate a community’s health. A measure of success for any cycle-scheme in my mind is that children and elders will be able to safely move themselves where they need to go, like they do in European cities that have had the foresight to plan towards cycling and avoid the obesity, decrepitude and social isolation we find rife amongst our own populations dependent on automobiles. We use the term ‘car-centred living is unsustainable’ a lot, but here is a choice that being unsustainable presents: either shift soon by choice, based on need, or wait and react messily, desperately and with great expense as the result of inevitable economic or environmental shifts. The cities that have chosen the former option are already succeeding. Clinging to the latter, as opponents of any cycle scheme seem committed to doing, will have further inevitable consequences for our quality of life, now and for generations to come.

Britt Doughty-Godchaux

Camberley Avenue, Enfield