We’re increasingly relying on movement data to understand how cities are used. Journey patterns, popular routes and collision clusters reveal where streets and public spaces are under strain, or where design is not matching behaviour on the ground.
That evidence helps surveyors make the case for targeted interventions such as new crossings, safer junction layouts or improved cycling links, and to demonstrate the impact of infrastructure investment over time.
James Kavanagh MRICS, Head of Land and Resources at RICS, has experienced London’s cycling transformation, and knows exactly what’s behind it.
“I’ve cycled London’s streets for decades, and what strikes me most is how profoundly the city’s cycling environment is now shaped and safeguarded by planning intelligence, infrastructure design and interoperable geospatial data,” he says. “We’re no longer relying on intuition or outdated models of how people should move through the city; we’re responding to how they move.
“The granular journey data that now underpins planning, from the nearly 9m recorded Santander Cycle hires in 2025, to the detailed routing, collision mapping and junction-level risk analysis (Old Street, Elephant and Castle and Waterloo roundabouts were once notoriously dangerous), has transformed how cycling infrastructure is conceived, built and refined.
“These insights are essential. They tell us why places like Waterloo Station 3 dock support more than 104,000 annual hires, and where junctions like Camberwell Green or Brixton still demand deeper design interventions. That fusion of evidence, geospatial interoperability and responsive urban design is precisely why cycling in London is safer today than 20, ten or even five years ago.”
We’ve drawn on London’s Santander Cycles journey data for 2025 to highlight the busiest docking stations, routes and bikes across London. This has been combined with STATS19 road collision records for 2025, plus an analysis of the 5,000 most common start-end journey pairs, to map both cycle demand and risk at junction level and along key roads.
“We’re no longer relying on intuition or outdated models of how people should move through the city; we’re responding to how they move” James Kavanagh MRICS, Head of Land and Resources at RICS
