Cycling in Glasgow is having a moment. In September 2025, bikes outnumbered cars at every rush hour peak on Victoria Road, averaging 334 bikes to 270 cars, the first time that has ever been recorded on a Scottish urban street. The Glasgow Walking and Cycling Index 2025 reports 26 million cycling trips took place in the city last year alone.
And yet. Open the Glasgow Times comments section or scroll through Facebook, and you would think the bike was a threat to civilisation. Cycling in Glasgow sits squarely in the middle of a culture war it did not ask to be part of. In July 2025, England’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty warned that culture-war framing around cycling was actively damaging public health by distracting from the people who benefit most from active travel.
The humble bike is the most extraordinary machine for individual mobility ever built. Cheap, clean, social, accessible to almost everyone from four years old to ninety-four. Bikes do not require finite resources to run. They do not need extensive infrastructure. They are not dangerous. And right now, they are one of the most important tools Glasgow has.
This post makes one argument: the revolution will be brought to you by bicycle. Here is why cycling in Glasgow matters more than ever and why we need to stop letting the culture war get in the way.
Why Cycling in Glasgow Is a Health Revolution
The bike is vital in helping people remain mentally and physically healthy.
The UK is an increasingly sedentary nation, and most car-centric wealthy countries face the same challenge. Cycling is not the whole answer, but the evidence is clear that it helps.
A University of Glasgow and University of Edinburgh study published in BMJ Public Health, tracking 82,000 Scottish people over 18 years, found that people who cycle to work have a 47% lower risk of death from any cause, a 51% lower risk of dying from cancer, and are 20% less likely to be prescribed medication for mental health conditions compared with non-active commuters.
This is not marginal. This is transformative.
The Glasgow Walking and Cycling Index 2025 puts a city-level number on this: cycling in Glasgow currently prevents 1,174 serious long-term health conditions per year and delivers £565.1 million in economic benefit for individuals and the region annually.
To make that concrete, two stories from my life.
Man One: physical health. Two men I know, one in his sixties and one in his forties, have over the last few years adopted the bike as a primary tool for their health.
Man One had not cycled regularly. After retiring, he began cycling every other day initially just to maintain friendships, something older men increasingly struggle with after leaving work. The competitive instinct helped. He saw a friend cycle faster. The best way to get faster is to cycle more and lose weight.
Imagine cycling with twenty bags of sugar around you. Our older man did exactly that. Weight came off. Speed improved. Confidence grew.
For the first time, he took a gravel bike on a 40-mile journey over challenging terrain. As the late Professor Chris Oliver, Professor of Physical Activity for Health at the University of Edinburgh, wrote extensively, activity like this adds years to a life and gives more time with grandchildren. Arthritis and weight make running and weights difficult. Cycling removes those barriers.
This is clearly the kind of transformation that cycling in Glasgow could offer at scale.
Man Two; mental health. My second example is a colleague I invited out cycling, he turned up in football shorts and Adidas Sambas. He struggled to complete 40 km. Today he is a Category 2 cyclist who has ridden the Canary Islands and regularly covers 100 km at a pace that challenges professionals.
When asked what drives him, his answer is always the same: “It helps me stay focused on what matters, family.” Cycling helps him de-stress, process problems, and be the father and partner he wants to be.
The University of Edinburgh research backs this up, finding a 15% reduction in prescriptions for depression and anxiety among cycle commuters in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
These two stories echo for many. The evidence across medical disciplines confirms it. The humble bike is one of the most powerful tools available for addressing the mental and physical health crisis we face.
What Stops People Cycling in Glasgow?
The challenges are personal for many. The second argument concerns values and culture, specifically, what people value and what they consider acceptable.
Our values underpin our decisions. As for legitimacy: I mean the degree to which people accept their actions and the judgement of others on those actions. Cycling in Glasgow carries a social weight that has nothing to do with the actual act of riding a bike.
A quick tour of the practicalities people cite when arguing against cycling in Glasgow: weather, hills, infrastructure, distances, access. Read any Glasgow Times or Facebook post on cycling, and you will find the same bingo card of objections. Cycling Fallacies provides an excellent guide to why most of them are debunked. The practical argument is simple: review cycling from Helsinki to Hobart, and you will find people cycling in all kinds of environments and conditions. Low ridership in wealthy, developed nations cannot be explained by hills or rain. Not Just Bikes’ trip to the Bahamas flat, warm, small illustrates perfectly how a country that should be a cycling paradise has terrible cycling rates, simply because it built its culture around the car.
The solution is culture change. But how do you shift a culture that has spent sixty years tying the car to identity, status and freedom?
The car has been bound up with economic status for sixty to eighty years. Being seen in the latest, most powerful car signals success. This is not an accident, it has been marketed, legislated and normalised. Consider how politicians frame the debate. David Frost, a former UK government negotiator, wrote on Twitter:
“It’s not a ‘problem’, it’s a good thing. In poorer countries, people depend on public transport & bikes. When they get richer, they want cars because they bring freedom. Public transport will never be good enough for a free people.”
Breaking that down, he is content for people to be tied to a dangerous machine, polluting, climate-damaging and dependent on fossil fuels. And his framing that bikes are for poor countries reveals exactly the cultural association that holds cycling in Glasgow back for decades. He has apparently never visited Tokyo, Amsterdam or Berlin, or he has and simply associates the car with civilisation.
This attitude is precisely what has held cycling in Glasgow back for decades.
Hollywood reinforces it. As Nitish Pahwa wrote in his brilliant piece, Americans Are Ready to Embrace Bicycles, But There’s One Thing Standing in Their Way: “American culture would have you believe that bikes are for dorky children and even dorkier adults.
True freedom, not to mention success and societal approval, is found behind the wheel of a motorised vehicle.” The War on Cars podcast discussed the article at length, and the analysis holds just as true in the UK as in the US.
If you grow up watching films where man-children ride bikes and successful, attractive people drive, what does that tell you?
In July 2025, Professor Sir Chris Whitty challenged this narrative directly: “If active travel is merely perceived as an activity exclusive to middle-aged, Lycra-clad cyclists racing through parks, it completely overlooks the substantial health benefits available to many.” He called on politicians and the public to set aside the clichés and look at the data instead.
He is right. And the data, as we have seen, is explicit.
Safety: The Real Barrier to Cycling in Glasgow
My first two sections have largely focussed on men, men’s health, men’s well-being, men’s status and men’s egos. For men, the barriers are cultural and motivational. Getting men to take a risk and get on the bike is, relatively speaking, the easier challenge.
The rise of the MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra), the cult of Lance Armstrong, the rare Hollywood cycling moments like Premium Rush, these all show that men will often jump in and just do it when the culture permits or glamorises it. Cycling UK’s research confirms the gender gap in UK cycling participation.
But cycling is not all about sport. It is not all about racing. It is a fundamental tool for getting from A to B. It gives people independence. Not only that, but it lets children reach their friends. It gives people with impairments a means to enjoy improved mobility. Cycle Chic makes this case brilliantly for women and e-bikes.
So why do we not see many children, vulnerable people, and women cycling across Glasgow? Safety.
My wife and I used to cycle together regularly. At one point she had two bikes, a road bike and a city bike. That came to an end. Women receive significantly more abuse on the roads.
People on bikes are already seen by a minority of drivers as less than human; being a woman compounds that. UK Government road safety statistics confirm that women are disproportionately represented among road casualties. Wolf whistles, shouts from windows, comments at junctions, these are the mild end. On two separate occasions, we reported drivers to the police: one used their car to push us off the road; another stopped the vehicle and wanted a physical confrontation. On both occasions, the trigger was my wife and I cycling two abreast on wide residential streets. The police could not trace either driver.
The BMJ Public Health study captures the paradox precisely: cyclist commuters have twice the risk of being hospitalised due to a road traffic collision compared with non-active commuters. All those health benefits halved mortality risk, better mental health exist alongside a doubled road collision risk. The researchers concluded directly: “Our finding reinforces the need for safer cycling infrastructure.”
This is why segregated, safe cycling infrastructure is not a nice-to-have. It is the precondition for everything else.
The good news is that cycling in Glasgow is already improving. The Glasgow Avenues project is a genuine start. The South City Way delivered the Victoria Road breakthrough with more bikes than cars at rush hour, a first for any Scottish urban street. The Glasgow Walking and Cycling Index 2025 reports that 71% of Glasgow residents now feel confident walking or wheeling in their local area and that confidence is growing among women, disabled people and parents specifically.
The pushback from the cult of motoring continues, but when political will align with public safety outcomes, change happens fast. Look at Oslo, whose Vision Zero strategy achieved zero pedestrian deaths in its city centre through a combination of:
- Reducing city centre speed limits to 20 km/h
- Full pedestrianisation of central streets
- Over 3,500 speed bumps installed
- Raised, well-lit crossings with refuge medians
- Junction design that prioritises pedestrians
- Segregated cycle paths built to a high standard
- Increased enforcement and public awareness campaigns
Safety addresses the fundamentals. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applies here as much as anywhere: if people do not feel physically safe, they will not engage. Build the infrastructure, enforce the rules, and the people follow.
The Road Ahead: Making Cycling in Glasgow Normal
The bicycle holds real potential to change Glasgow not as an ideological project, but as a practical tool for health, economic resilience and everyday life.
The evidence is no longer speculative. Cycling in Glasgow already prevents over 1,400 serious health conditions per year and generates more than half a billion pounds in economic benefit. It takes up to 180,000 cars off the road every single day. On Victoria Road in the Southside, bikes now outnumber cars at rush hour, something that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.
The challenge is not evidence. The evidence is overwhelming. The challenge is culture and political will.
If cycling in Glasgow and in cities everywhere is to become genuinely normal not a sport, not a statement, not a culture-war flashpoint, three things need to happen:
Make it safe. Segregated infrastructure is not optional. The health benefits of cycling are neutralised if people are afraid to ride. Oslo, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen all prove that when you build it safely, people come.
Make it normal. Challenge the framing in media, in politics, and in conversation that ties the car to success and the bike to poverty or eccentricity. As Professor Sir Chris Whitty said, the greatest beneficiaries of active travel are currently the least active, the people least likely to feature in any cycling culture war.
Make it happen. Glasgow City Council’s expanding city cycling network aims to place every resident within 800 metres of a dedicated cycleway. The Golan-Partick Bridge alone recorded over one million crossings in just six months. Build it well, and Glasgow uses it.
To coin a slogan: make it safe, make it normal, make it happen. Get on yer bike.
Further reading: The Miracle Pill · The 15-Minute City · Smart Cities
This post is part of a series on Glasgow, density, and building a city for people. Read the companion piece: Do People Make Glasgow? Why Density, Not Cars, Will Save the City.
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